About the age of 10 or so I was bringing TV's home from the dump and just used to pull them apart - was too scared to plug them in!
One day I got daring and bought a small Philips black and white home from the dump, it was a transformerless series wired tubes etc. I popped the back off and found a blown fuse, replaced the fuse turned it on and the filaments lit up, so I stood there and waited....After about a minute or so I could hear off station noise from the speaker...things were looking good so far...then there was almighty shower of sparks from the flyback section and the fuse blew again!
Gave me a hell of a fright so I left it alone for a few days until I plucked up enough courage to have another go at it. Second time around I looked in the area where the sparks came from an noticed this round thing (capacitor) with a burn't hole in one side of it. Ironically I had a junk box full of parts I'd pulled from other TV's and found something that looked near enough, somehow soldered it in, powered the set on again and it worked!
That was it I was hooked on old TV sets and have never looked back
