Rants of a 1970's Era Repairman

[Findm-Keepm]

Originally Posted by cwmoser

The business model today that is analogous to TV repair is PC servicing.


I wonder if you TV repair guys in the 1970s charging $25 to travel to, spend 30 minutes looking over, removing chassis, travel to shop, repair time, parts, and take back and setup ... did you really make much money??

Carl

I know 7 TV repairmen - guys that owned (and some still own) their own shops in the 70's - 90's. None of them are rich, and all will tell you they made money in the 70's and 80s, up until the advent of the disposable set, often called BPC around here.

Thanks to the ubiquity of the RCA "clone sets," all one had to do was get proficient on the most common problems. I won an old tube caddy on eBay a few years ago. It was funny because all of the stuff in it was the same stuff we carried back in the day - replacement circuit breakers, belfuses, degaussing "nickels", tuner bulbs, a few pigtail fuses, some 1KV power supply diodes, tunerlube (grease - not spray!) and knob springs. Those parts, plus a good supply of RCA, Zenith, and Admiral specific tubes, and you could just about service 90% of the sets in the home - it was the 10% you had to pull that you possibly didn't make much money off of, but it evened out in the end. I've gone on many $18.50 service calls in the past where we fixed the set in the home, and often the customer had another for us to take in for repair, or we were given the set for parts. We made money either way.


Cheers,