Or in this case, some serious arcing. I powered up a zenith 4 tube hybrid this evening for the first time to see what would happen. The idiot tech installed the power switch backwards so it turns on on the "off" position. Ok, got sound. now I wait for the HV. Dont get anything, completely dead but you can hear the flyback ringing. Time to check the HOT, it looks OK. Then the smoke starts showing up in more than once place? What? Couldnt hear a thing. I see the CRT socket start to melt a hole through it. 5 KV focus lead burnt a nice carbon trace to the ground strap. Ok, that can be fixed. Then I see a bright light shining through the chassis by the focus pot. Now that thing went up in smoke and burn to a crisp. The camera was right next to me, so I figured Id show the cool pics of the zenith burning away on me. Ive got some 6 or 7 zenith 4TH chassis in storage. So Im sure i can bring it back. Its a million hour set, cheap magnavox tubes, dirty beat up old TV. Worth a save I guess. Its still in one piece so far.

Neat picture of an electrical arc. Not always easy to capture.

David

nice 'action' shots. sorry to hear that it happened but at least you got the parts to fixerup.

Woo Hoo! who brought the marshmallows? I guess it was time to sacrifice one to the TV gods. Logan

Neat photo. Better now then when you're sitting down watching the set!

I saw a lot of those sockets do that. I usually would replace with an older style socket. Watch out for too much HV causing too much focus voltage. Usually I'd find it was running a little high on those sets, although not near as bad as the early solid state Zeniths with the failed safety caps.

Charles

Good lord! Can extremely high ESR off a cap or possibly a shorted PS cap that runs the focus circuit cause this?