most disturbing TV experience?

[truetone36]

When I was 9 years old, I experienced my first bad experience when the power transformer in my old Capehart crapped out and the set caught fire! I remember that day every time I smell burned insulation. and then there was last year when the selenium rectifier in my RCA kcs136 went. I'll never forget that smell, and neither will my wife! she still doesn't want my sets in the house!!


Dumont-First with the finest in television.

[jpdylon]

man these are all crazy stories, and i thought i had a shocker....

I had another time where I was working on a friend's set. it was a panasonic i believe, kind of a POS with the "panacolor" preset system. I thought it needed a new trippler because my friend complained of flashes and snapping accompanied by bad focus.

I THOUGHT I had discharged the CRT. Connected a clip to my screwdriver and the ground strap on the tube and slipped it under the anode cover. I heard a dull zap and held it there for a good 30 seconds. Figured it was good to go.

i reach to unclip the HV lead and I heard a bang in my ears. I recall my arm shooting back painfully. Turns out I had popped my shoulder out of its socket. man that hurt.

The ground strap on the CRT was not properly connected. The connector that clipped to the chassis was badly corroded and obviously not making contact. Wish I thought of that before I got zapped. Cleared up the connector and the set worked perfectly after that.

[kx250rider]

Originally Posted by jpdylon

man these are all crazy stories, and i thought i had a shocker....

I had another time where I was working on a friend's set. it was a panasonic i believe, kind of a POS with the "panacolor" preset system. I thought it needed a new trippler because my friend complained of flashes and snapping accompanied by bad focus.

I THOUGHT I had discharged the CRT. Connected a clip to my screwdriver and the ground strap on the tube and slipped it under the anode cover. I heard a dull zap and held it there for a good 30 seconds. Figured it was good to go.

i reach to unclip the HV lead and I heard a bang in my ears. I recall my arm shooting back painfully. Turns out I had popped my shoulder out of its socket. man that hurt.

The ground strap on the CRT was not properly connected. The connector that clipped to the chassis was badly corroded and obviously not making contact. Wish I thought of that before I got zapped. Cleared up the connector and the set worked perfectly after that.

We've all done variations of "I thought I had grounded out the HV, but !!! "... I've probably gotten that shock a few dozen times. The nastiest is when it happens on a metal-cabinet set. When you yank your arm out, the skin gets peeled off by the sharp edge of the top of the cabinet like a banana

That stuff is all bad, but the two worst TV repair accidents I have heard were: In the late 70s, a tech in Los Angeles was working on a Sony portable. He was powering it up during troubleshooting, and a large electrolytic exploded and went into his eye socket, destroying the eye. And the absolute worst, also the most bizarre of accidents whether TV related or otherwise, was (I recall) in Chicago. I read about it in a TV repair magazine. A tech was working late alone, and went to get a 3-ring binder of manuals off a very high shelf. One of the manuals was loose, and slipped out of the binder. It fell in just a perfect way to slit his throat, and he was found as a fatal victim the next day.

Makes us think!

Charles

[jpdylon]

man that's scary, loosing an eye and getting your throat slit -- just from doin the everyday tech work...

Here's a neat one I found in a 1955 issue of Radio Electronics magazine. This poor woman was the victim of a CRT impolsion at point blank. That's gonna leave a mark.

[Bobby Brady]

Bonnies' set looked almost new.
What caused that?
I looked her name up and couldn't find it. Harbor Hill, Fla. doesn't come up either.
I suppose she may not be around but it wouldn't surprise me if she were around and if asked would tell the story like it was just yesterday.
I think the city Harbor Hill may be a mistake.
Do cities ever change such names?

[kx250rider]

I know of the exact thing happening in a Philco-Ford 21" B&W portable in about 1980... It was the Avon lady's set, and she heard what she thought was a car accident in the middle of the night. She didn't find out what happened 'til the next morning!

She called me over to haul it away since she knew I liked to fool with TVs. She didn't want it anymore after that, and she was ready for a color TV anyhow. I couldn't find any reason for the failure. It had just plain imploded! The set wasn't on, and no problems with the chassis. Normally when this happens, it's an exploding electrolytic or a newly installed CRT with some kind of pressure wrongfully applied to the tube (bracket on wrong, etc).

I didn't mention this one in the earlier post since nobody got hurt, and no damage (except for the TV).

Charles

I had a supply multi-section filter cap explode in an early Panasonic color console and the can ended up going through the pix tube while doing convergance. It took almost 2 years for all of the glass shards to fester out of my arm. I did get another tube into that set and it worked up until 10 years ago when the supply of HO tubes really dried up.

109

[drh4683]

About the worst thing that ever happened on my end was with a new 1971 Emerson console. (remember those two NOS dumont and emerson color consoles I picked up a few years back). I had that emerson going in the basement with the back off after I touched up the convergence. I was working on another set while the emerson was playing on the otherside of the basement. All of a sudden a loud POW and lost the focus. The set was emitting an awful fog haze that was RED in color! The entire basement was filled with a thick red fog and the smell was awful. Typical selenium rectifier went up in smoke. Luckily I have an in-house fan in the hall upstairs. Closed all the windows kept the basement door open with a few windows open in the basement. The vacuum of the house fan pulled that smoke haze out immediately. Only about a day or so for the smell to dissipate.

[bgadow]

I feel lucky that I don't have any really bad stories. The worst injury I ever sustained from a tv set came in the mid 90s. I had a later model Admiral bw console which I decided to carry upstairs to my then girlfriend's bedroom. I did okay until I got to the door & had to sit the tv down; I dropped it & it hit my big toe just right to knock the nail clean off. OUCH! That nail hasn't been right since. Still, I insist on carrying heavy tv sets around by myself.

I've had a couple radios with black beauties which would periodically let out a good bang. I had the chassis out & playing on this one AA5 (a Motorola table radio/phono) and when the black beauty blew confetti went everywhere. To show how smart I was, I replaced it with a NOS black beauty and quickly repeated the episode!

Regarding unexplained picture tube implosions: that above RCA is the worst I've seen. Shows how good that safety glass really is. I had an early sixties Zenith that fell over-hard-in the back of the truck when I brought it home. Still, it worked great and I used it for a couple years. At the time most of my collection was in an unheated shed. I walked in one day to find the crt had cracked cleanly across the face right down the middle (horizontally). I kicked myself later for not trying that set before I junked it, though now I realize that the crt had to have gone to air & so nothing real exciting would have happened. Anyway, I suppose extreme cold killed it, maybe with help from old damage from the rough ride home.

[larschr]

This spring i found a Luxor set at the dump. I had been looking for that specific model for 10 years, so of course it ended up in the back of the car. I brought it up in my mothers apartment where i removed the back cover to look for burn marks, blown components etc. but i did not find any, so i hooked up the antenna and plugged in the power. The sound came on immediately, and after some seconds i got some blue lines at the bottom of the screen. I let it run for about 5 minutes with nothing more happen. I bandeg it in the side, and got a loud crackling sound and some smoke. I turned it off immediately. It turned out that one of the soldering joints on a capacitor had gone bad, and the entire comnnection pin had burned away. There was also a nice little hole in the circuit board. I found a new capacitor in a junked Tandberg chassis and put it in the Luxor. I Now i had a picture, but it was dim and impossible to get sharp. I brought it home, cleaned it up and then brought it to work to show it to some friends. We hooked up a VCR, and despite the bad picture, they was impressed. But after abut 10 minutes there was a loud "zap", the picture and sound went out and the power supply made a loud squealing sound. It was a bad HV output transistor. I went to the dump and found another Luxor, a cheaper model, but with the same transistor. I later replaced the CRT, and now it only needs a convergence adjustment to work perfect. A really great set, after all.

By the way, it belongs to the story that my mother knocked over the old CRT when it was standing on her living room floor, and it went to air with a nice "pooooffffff".

[dr.ido]

There is a certain Rifa foil cap usually used as a mains filter cap that has a habit of filling a room with smoke. They were common in both Thomson monitors and the Astec power supplies used in TRS-80 model IIIs. Both were common at our user group meetings at the time. So common it became kind of a running joke around here as to when the next one would let go. Every so often one would let go, we'd laugh and keep on doing whatever we were doing as would the monitor or TRS-80 that was creating a cloud of smoke. The reaction from those who weren't aware of it wasn't so calm though.

I'm quite sure I still have at least a couple of these monitors in storage waiting to let out their smoke.

Why these companies put a 250V cap across the mains in units for sale in countries with 240V mains I will never know. I have never seen the 400V version of the same cap fail.

[holmesuser01]

I was having a look at a nice CTC-9 in the customers home. The complaint was no pic, with a white line across the screen. I pulled the set out from the wall just a bit so I could get my then-smaller behind between the set and the wall. Removed the back. Looked over the set and found the vertical output was not lit. I reached toward the tube to bump it and see if if came on. Touched the tube, and the pic came back on. Started to pull my arm back, when I brushed the bell of the kine. I heard a CCCRRRAAAACCCKKKKK! and I was AGAINST the wall--HARD! I had not noticed that the room heating radiator was behind a metal grille inside the wall behind the set. I had discharged the HV thru my hand and out my back at my belt-line.

My customer was just sitting there watching the progress, and when she heard the thump of me hitting the wall, she looked at the set, which was now playing normally, and said, "Oh, that was fast! Do I get a discount?"

The vertical output tube had almost no solder on the tube socket pins. After I recovered, I remember touching up the solder work, and basically charging her for a standard service call. She never called us again, as she thought I fixed it too fast to charge THAT MUCH! I never forgot that good old HV feeling!

[electronjohn]

Our old Zenith 25" console was acting buck, so, off with back for a look-see. Using a finger probe, I managed to draw a HV arc right through the fingernail, the finger..then on to ground. OWIE! At least the wound was cauterized.
Not TV-related...I've been working on Am and FM broadcast transmitters for over 30 years, and have only been zapped once. Working on an old Gates 1KW AM, had the back off, one arm behind my back and the other holding the shorting stick. I THOUGHT I'd gotten all the caps...of course had missed the one I immediately touched.
About 3600V @ 400ma put me into the block wall right behind the transmitter.
The worst broadcast-related zapping I know of concerns a guy working on a 20KW Collins FM. We're talking about 7800V or so @ about 3.3 amps in the PA supply. Guy got super pissed trying to find the problem...flung a crescent wrench into the transmitter's guts, only to have it land RIGHT across the terminals of a BIG filter cap.
Blew the wrench right back out, hit him in the face...broke his jaw and took out over a dozen teeth.

[Pete Deksnis]

Shakespeare must have said it elegantly somewhere, but every one of these stories brings on a painful chuckle.

[JCFitz]

Now that we're talking about getting injured I still bear the scar of the picture tube that cut my leg 20 years ago. When I was in my late teens I had one of my projects I drug home in my room by my bed with the back off,a 1968 RCA B/w tv my uncle had in his shed. Turns out it was the tv my mom had when I was a baby. My aunt used to take the tubes out of stuff and check them at the drug store and replace the bad ones. Only she had put 1 or 2 in the wrong socket. Sat for years til got it. I had all the good tubes in it in the right sockets and I had a raster but no picture or sound.I went to bed with the tv by my bed. I don't know why because I never did before I rolled off the bed asleep. I woke up real fast as the neck of the picture tube had broken off in my leg and I was cut bad. I went to the bathroom and got a towel and wrapped it tight around my leg. My mom screamed bloody murder and rushed me to the hospital. 20 stitches later I came home to clean up the blood and broken glass. Needless to say that tv never got fixed. I sledgehammered it for what it did to me. I could have bled to death if it had cut an artery.