What did you last repair?

I was always impressed by how long it took for the air to stop whooshing into that tube through the relatively small nipple-ectomy. As I recall, I could smoke at least part of a cigarette while I waited.
So you old(er) farts, tell me: Was I just being silly with the whole duck-and-cover thing? (Pretty sure I know the answer, heh.) 😛
Most of the old (1950's) round color tubes had a metal bell. Only the face and neck were glass. You could place them face down on the ground outside and whack the neck with a 2X4. The old guy who ran the trash dump where I shopped for parts as a kid simply wrapped duct tape around the neck right at the bell and whacked the end near the socket with a long metal pipe like a TV antenna mast. He did that to all the CRT's in the dump site before the dozer came to bury it all. There must have been a reason for this. The nipple-ectomy worked too and I did that to all CRT's that had to be scrapped in our high school electronics class.

It's always smart to play things safe, but of all the picture tubes I've "deflated" over the years, I never got that goofy with using boards as shields.
I'd throw a padded moving blanket over the tube and whack it once with a hammer...... done......next!
You got lucky. People have been killed by an imploding CRT. I used to "deflate" CRT's and apply "rapid disassembly" to complete TV's with high speed lead. Depending on how and where the CRT was hit, and whether or not it had a bonded front safety glass attached to its face, the CRT could just suck air or toss shards of high speed glass hundreds of feet. Most CRT's from the 60's on had a thick safety glass glued to the front face to prevent an implosion if the TV was struck from the front. Remember the creeping crud that encroached in from the edges of many CRT's in the 60's. That was a fungus that attacked the bonding agent, a silicone based glue. Shooting a bonded face TV set from the front with a copper jacketed bullet often created a single bullet hole in the front. The bell of the CRT did usually shatter, but it wasn't usually violent enough to breach the cabinet. Shooting the same TV set from the side about 2 inches back from the face with a rifled slug fired from a shotgun generally scattered the entire TV set over a 100+ foot area. After having glass and plastic rain down around us from a 19 inch B&W Admiral glass and plastic portable TV, we moved our old station wagon further from the pile of TV's and shot from behind the car.

CRT's from old TV's will usually float. Let one loose on the water, wait for it to get pretty far away, then shoot it right at the water line and water will go 100+ feet in the air!
 
We liked to play hammer toss with old monitors... Dont of them are downright hard to break.
I mad one of those potato cannons out of PVC pipe many years ago. Mine might have had direct injection, forced air, and electronic ignition. Shooting an IBM green screen monitor directly in the face from point blank range with it only ripped the CRT loose and pushed it back into the cabinet. Shoving a 1/4-20 bolt into the potato with its head sticking out the front did make a mess out of the old IBM. Made a mess out of an old rusty T-bird too. Note that potato cannons are now classified as a "destructive device" in the US and possession or use of one is now a felony. Don't make one!
 
Note that potato cannons are now classified as a "destructive device" in the US and possession or use of one is now a felony. Don't make one!
I suppose that includes bicycle-pump powered D-cell launchers too, right? Pumpkin/watermelon launching catapults…

If you make loudspeakers large enough they could also be considered destructive devices. When That happens my give-a-damn is going to be so busted it wont matter if I spend the rest of my life in jail.
 
My last repairs/refurbishments were a Pioneer PL-12D, PL-12R, a Dual CS505-1 and an AudioTechnica LP60X, mostly from eBay as "for parts", but salvagable with the odd replacement part, oiling/adjustment and ready to sell on as. The PL-12x and CS505-x are models I've owned or own so these were familiar mechanisms to work on. Quite satisfying to fix and turn a modest profit from, although I worry about trashing a tonearm one day whem inverting chassis' out of the case.

My main bugbear is how many come with cracked lids, or even the one shipped to me with the platter not secured, so it broke loose and knocked a hole in the lid...
 
I suppose that includes bicycle-pump powered D-cell launchers too, right? Pumpkin/watermelon launching catapults…

If you make loudspeakers large enough they could also be considered destructive devices. When That happens my give-a-damn is going to be so busted it wont matter if I spend the rest of my life in jail.
Here's a destructive loudspeaker.....LOL!

bigassedspeaker.jpg
 
Good vintage synth to own.

I attempted a repair yesterday on an old Samsung DVP-xxx DVD player. It was frustrating: there are tiny pots that need dissassembly and reassembly of the transport mechanism to test each time. These things are tiny, I can't turn them with anything to latch onto the cruciform center. I managed to turn them by pushing on a flat edge around the crux.

It normally keeps skipping and doesn't load. I managed to get it load once, but skipping to the next track got it in trouble again.
 
I suppose that includes bicycle-pump powered D-cell launchers too, right? Pumpkin/watermelon launching catapults…
The law was originally drafted to make the old pool acid and Draino (HCl and NaOH) bombs illegal. As laws go, it became broad enough to be used against lots of things, but it states something about explosive force that is created by a chemical reaction. Therefore, electrical and air pressure "things" are not illegal....yet. Potato cannons and electrical conduit + large firecracker + AA cell cannons are a no-no too.

I got a very stern warning from a very angry cop when I exploded a few 1 gallon plastic Gatorade and Ocean Spray juice bottles with my air 120 PSI compressor. He caught me in my front yard with the fragments of a recently overpressured bottle in my hands and was near the hand cuff stage despite me explaining that there was no chemical reaction, therefore no law breaking. This was going nowhere fast, so I changed my tactics, pleaded ignorance, and promised never to do it again.

Filling putting a few ounces of liquid nitrogen in a similar bottle, screwing on the lid, and running away FAST will make a MUCH bigger bang as the bottle freezes hard like glass. Very sharp fragments fly in all directions. Technically boiling a liquid is not a chemical reaction but trying to explain that to an angry cop while standing next to a crater in the ground may not be a good idea.

I lived in the same house in Florida for 37 years. Most of the cops knew me and overlooked things like minor explosions, fireballs, loud noises, massive smoky burnouts in the street, microwave ovens full of plasma, flaming electronics and other shenanigans. Some even watched our NYE and 4th of July antics from their cop cars. I even got into a two hour long rooftop bottle rocket war using pipe for launchers and garbage can lids for shields with a neighbor who was a cop which drew quite an audience. I raised the white flag when I ran out of ammo. The compressor - bottle incident involved a young cop trying to assert his authority that I had never seen before.
We used to use tennis balls, hairspray, and pringles cans taped together... More fun is to take Redbird strike anywhere matches, remove the heads, pack them into a tennis ball, wrap with duct tape, and whip it 🙂
The tennis ball cans themselves work quite well. Tape two or three together for best launch. Drench the tennis ball in lighter fluid for a flaming fireball effect. Launch them over the apartment complex courtyard or pool deck late at night when people are out there doing all sorts of stuff for maximum attention. Do not attempt to hit a flaming tennis ball with a racquet unless you want to set yourself on fire!
 
The local REI store used to sell pellets for gas lights like the coal miners used in the olden days. Add a few pellets to water and you had acetylene gas. Take a 4" diameter piece of PVC pipe, glue a cap on one end. Drill a hole near the top and put the business end of a BBQ grill lighter, add water and pellets, put a plastic margarine container lid on the top, wait a few seconds... operate grill lighter, and bingo-bango- duck soup.
 
A friends ROTEL rsx-1055 receiver
1 bad surround channel. Sanken 1386a and one it’s side emitter .27 ohm Shot
replaced both compliments in that channel and now has the lowest dc offset of all 5 channels

The issue with all these pre hdmi receivers is whether it’s worth it to replace all caps etc.
since the total worth would exceed it’s used value and still be out of date on top of it all..
 
Some even watched our NYE and 4th of July antics from their cop cars.
In NEOH lotsa folks discharge firearms on NYE. This year, however, a police officer shot and killed a guy in Canton OH without warning.

It's true that the projectile reaches a kind of critical velocity, but still potent enough to kill someone. I think it was Loyola University New Orleans undergrad who was killed by an errant bullet from an NYE celebration decades ago.
 
In NEOH lotsa folks discharge firearms on NYE. This year, however, a police officer shot and killed a guy in Canton OH without warning.

It's true that the projectile reaches a kind of critical velocity, but still potent enough to kill someone. I think it was Loyola University New Orleans undergrad who was killed by an errant bullet from an NYE celebration decades ago.
Firearm misuse on NYE seems to be a tradition among the Hispanic community in South Florida. Back in the 70's it was decided that no airplanes would takeoff or land from 11:45 Dec 31 to 0:15 Jan 1 after a DC-3 cargo plane landed with two bullet holes in the tail section.

None of our exploits ever used firearms, but several pounds of black powder or Pyrodex were consumed in one of our NYE or 4th of July street parties. All percussive events produced a sound far different from that of a gunshot. The firecracker seen here next to a popular cell phone of the time period ceased to exist on the date shown on the phone. A Broward County Sherrif's Deputy was watching from his front yard (across the street from us) and his son was the person that lit the fuse. The sound pressure wave that this firecracker produces is plainly audible at the City of Sunrise police department HQ about two blocks away. It was one of many that rocked the neighborhood that night. Nobody was hurt, and nobody was arrested from our street party. Apparently, there was a drug related event down the street that had the cops busy. One dead, and an unknown number in jail. After 37 years in that neighborhood, I was glad to leave. It wasn't like it was in 1977 when I bought the house.
 

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This was changed on a flood light. 20Watts, versions of up to 100 watts are available.
Thermally glued to the housing, it is a direct driven LED with driver, you solder mains wires to the two points, the black thing is the driver, ceramic top and aluminum back plate. Yellow is the LED...
Held down by a frame to the base plate.
Can be used in street lights, high bay lights and so on.
 
I have been using those "100 watt" flood lights for about 7 years. I put "100 watt" in quotes since the whole thing only draws 80 VA from the line voltage. The early versions had an encapsulated power supply and a COB LED module that had 100 1 watt LED chips on a 25 X 25 mm substrate, wired as 10 parallel strings of 10 series chips. After about 1 year of use in dusk to dawn operation one of the LED chips in the center would short which would cause the whole string to fail. This led to the failure of the entire module within a day or two. The later versions used 2 of the same chips each running on about half the power. They lasted longer but failed in a similar manner. The last one I bought used a larger substrate, about 100 X 100 mm with 100 LED chips on it. It is much brighter, draws about 100 VA, and has lived for over 2 1/2 years so far.
 
I have a 100 Watt flood light that takes 120W from the wall and it's noticeably brighter than the 500W halogen I used to use... It uses 20 CREE 5W chips. It's an outdoor flood with the heatsink molded into the chassis.
My only complaint is the 60Hz flicker but it makes seeing the strobe-o-scope on the turntable easy 😀
 
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