A good friend of mine who recently passed away told me about purchasing his first car, brand new, using money he made from repairing TVs around his neighborhood. He started by running tubes to the local store, testing them, and replacing them. Then, he bought a tube tester and a small stock, which he’d carry in a wagon.
There was a doctor in his neighborhood with the first model of a color TV, and the tubes would constantly overheat and pop. This was the cash cow that bought him his first car. He eventually realized that he could solve this issue by adding some active cooling to the TV by running a small fan off of one of the TV’s circuits. And that’s how he accidentally killed his first job.
if dad couldn’t fix it with the tube from the grocery store kiosk.
I’m both bemused and curious what in the world that might mean.
My best guess is that they are probably referring to a degaussing hoop. You used to be able to rent / borrow those to try to fix your TV if you kid played with magnets near it. I’d never describe it as a tube though.
I remember those, but for tape deck heads, not TV’s.
Anyway, Scirocco came with the very likely correct analysis, if you can see the other comments in this chain.
It means the shower might have been too hot?
I’m afraid I’m more lost than ever.
Wasn’t this about TV repair?
Old televisions used vacuum tubes in their circuitry in a similar role to transistors in (more) modern electronics.
These were literally little glass bulbs with bits inside that heated up, glowed and did magical things with electrons. They had some number of pins on the bottom and plugged into the television board similar to CPU sockets (but with only 5ish pins in a circle)
These tubes were not particularly long-lived and were fragile physical devices. When they were “on the fritz” it was literally often possible to smack them back into place/alignment/operation. Hence the trope of a TV with a bad picture, slapping it around and voila it works again. This was a literal thing that really happened and works, at least until the internals of whatever tube were too far out of alignment.
At this point, rather than call an expensive repairman (always a man in those days), you could take your suspected bad tube to the grocery store, where there might be a machine that resembles a 1980s arcade cabinet, which has a bunch of various common vacuum-tube sockets on it. Dad will plug the ‘bad’ tube into the (in)correct socket and the machine will pronounce that tube to be GOOD or BAD with some version of accuracy.
With that information, dad can select a new identical or similar tube from the rack that’s under the testing board, inside the cabinet.
Maybe it will work, maybe not.
Lots of specific tubes were replaceable with more generic versions that “will work” and there was a lot of effort to consolidate the vast number of tube variants, so another important tool was the equivalency chart-- look up your old tube in a book of tiny print/tables and see what generic part number might work to ‘fix’ the TV
Without having to call the repairman to your house, which was also very much a real thing.
Ah shoot, I’d completely forgotten about vacuum tubes. Everything fell in to place with that reminder, but it was fun reading what you had to say about these things. Thanks for that nice writeup!
I’ve always found it interesting how brands that are either not household names or have been mostly forgotten shaped technology that we use every day. You can find LED bulbs or cheap electronics with the Curtis-Mathes brand nowadays but back in the 60’e and 70’s, they set the standard for repairable TV’s, at least in the US. They basically modularized everything to where there were like 10 replacable parts and the repairman carried all of those with him. They could swap out a bad component in minutes.
Another one that was never a household name is Allen Organ Company. They make electronic pipe organs, which replicate the sounds of an actual pipe organ, sans pipes. In the early 70’s they created the first fully digital organ. It had a small computer that generated the tones. Even though it had a several large PCB’s and a pretty big footprint for its limited capabilities compared to computers today, at the time it was a pretty impressive feat.
I haven’t owned a tv since 2002. A friend’s kid thew a remote at their’s and cracked the screen. I asked if they could get it repaired and everyone looked at me like I had two heads. “You just get a new one…!”
Just bring it to carglass, they inject their special resin, and Bob’s your uncle! Good as new!
Even when Tv repairmen were common, they never repaired broken screens. TV repairmen used to swap out components but not the screen.
Not least because CRT screens were nigh on bulletproof (and heavy as fuck, containing vacuum reliably needs mass).
OMFG they were so insanely heavy!
In college (early 2000s), we had a 50-something inch CRT. I think that thing weighed upwards of 500 lbs, was positively massive (maybe 3 feet deep?) and it took 4-6 people to move it in and out of our on-campus apartments every year.
It was fucking baller for the time, though
HEHE I am sure it weighed more than 500 pounds! I had a 24 inch or so TV around that time and holy hell it was nuts how heavy that thing was.
CRT “screens” are non-repairable for different reasons, but yeah
there are impossible to repair and extremely strong. they have to be, they have vacuum inside, if it cracks it can implode.
I had a CRT monitor back in the day that tipped off the edge of the desk while I was hooking it up.
CLUNK! - hiss
Welp.
I learned a valuable lesson about leverage that day.
happy it didn’t implode. they could have been a bomb…
acktually… I now have to double check if they implode at all…
Though not the most academic resource, the YouTubers How Ridiculous recently popped a CRT screen. Because of their video format, I’m having a bit of time identifying which one it was, but it might have been this:
It is kind of hard to see what is going on, but found this one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9_Pez2btt0&list=PLkpFupEMkI3uOPaU9NQ45paO7286JVYUH
It does not implode as I thought, I was wrong. Also that was the chilliest dude to ever smash a tv with a fire extinguisher,
Gone are they days were people get things repaired, especially the “simple things” like getting a good leather shoes sole replaced, or getting a couch redone. Though planned obsolescence plays a role in this as well.
It also means these services are more expensive as a result.
Shout out to Bosch… I have a 10-year old dishwasher from them and the drain pump stopped working. It was so easy to replace and readily available. I was actually happy to have it break, all told.
A lot of enshitification has happened in the last decade so no idea if their products are still like that, but when the time comes to get a new one I’ll certainly be giving them my first look.
Sad, ain’t it? I repair all kinds of stuff. Have a 50" TV that only needs a new board when I can afford it. The 55" on my wall needed 2 new capacitors, $8 on eBay.
when I lived in the UK there were shoe repairmen everywhere, they were great, and if the repair was easy they wouldn’t even charge me.
in the States I haven’t seen a single one
Fast fashion ain’t just for fabrics baybeeeee
I think it’s both chicken and egg. It’s more expensive to repair relative to replace now, so often it’s more economical to replace. This leads to less repair knowledge and services, so increases cost, making replacement easier etc. Many times are more complex and so what used to be repaired with simple tools and know how, now requires specialized tools and proprietary replacement parts. Supply chains being just-in-time for production means many parts are not stocked for repair, which also slows everything down too.
Design problem, you can modularize these things so they’re easy to repair, consider your average desktop PC. Indeed that’s what your ‘proprietary replacement parts’ are, backed up by DMCA (and world wide equivalents forced by US trade agreements) making reverse engineering them a felony. Problem is there’s no financial incentive compared to getting you to buy another one soon, nor is there competition on this front. Hmm, perhaps a (legal) regulation problem.
Modular is better for repair, but not cheapest to produce or space saving. So, people naturally choose the cheaper, more compact design.
The whole idea of copyright was to prevent people profiting from your design innovations. If the only purpose your design causes is preventing competition, then it should lose protection in my view.
So, for instance making printer ink incompatible with copy protection serves no benefit to the owner. So it should lose protection. There needs to be a balance to protect creatives, but in the rapidly changing age, the time and scope should be dramatically reduced. No technical innovations from 10 years ago need to be protected.
there’s a million better alternatives to the current shitass IP/patent/trademark system but until the US empire finally finishes falling none will come about
While I’m not optimistic, there does seem to be a movement away from protecting US IP since the trump tariffs broke the compact. Lots of media on here about people and companies and government seeking digital sovereignty/independence.
So it could chip away gradually.
I was lucky enough to find a shoe shop that does really good resoles in my city. Not impossible to repair stuff, just hard
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You also have to be able to afford shoes worthy of the considerable repair expense.
And even then it seems like the boots theory is dead for most stuff. Even when you buy the “premium” products they fall apart and are made of crap materials or are designed to be irreparable
For me it was more about how much longer they would last. The soles they gave me were better than the originals. The rest is just small stiches and patchwork I can do at home
There’s a shoe repair shop in my town. People absolutely do get simple things repaired what you can’t get repaired are things like TVs anymore.
But things don’t break like they used to, it used to be that a component would fail and you could just replace that broken component but everything’s integrated these days so if one thing goes down the whole thing is dead.
You may not own a tv but do you own a computer monitor? No one fixes those either and a tv is essentially a monitor with an extra control board. The screen is the device.
If the glass of the screen is broken the TV is gone. You cannot fix that. If there are other things it could be. Mine had the back lights out and for like 20$ I bought them online and changed them myself.
Really the most you can hope for these days is to encounter two broken TVs of the same model, with different faults.
Luck holding, this lets you wind up with a single working unit.
Sadly even if the model number is exactly identical that doesn’t guarantee they have the same internals. Ask me how I know :/
Yeah, most of the cost of the TV is the panel. If you’re buying a replacement panel the part would cost basically the same as a new TV (or maybe even more).
By contrast, my parents had a TV that started boot looping the morning after a thunderstorm and they’d had at least one lightning strike very close by. They got a local TV repairman out and he was able to get a replacement mainboard and the TV worked perfectly after that. I think the board was $100 or $150 and his time and labor was $100, coming to their house to do the work. If I remember correctly we could see scorch marks on the bad board near the Ethernet port.
Getting the new board was a bit of a hassle; that manufacturer didn’t sell parts directly and I think it took him 3 tries to get the right board. It seems like they have the same board in a lot of models but they flash them for different screens, so even though they were labeled as being for my parents’ TV it took a few tries to get the right one in. I feel like that’s a problem that would’ve been easier if the manufacturer supported repairs better.
Replacing the LED panel of a common 65in flat-screen TV costs almost the same amount as a brand new TV and months of time, and money to ship between the repair center and your home due to the weight; lol of course they looked at you like that, you sounded silly, innocently ignorant and ridiculous.
That’s true for pretty much any panel size. Especially in 2002, when the TV had barely a processor inside.
A now abandoned building at the end of the block use to be a repair store. Tv, vacuum, any other machines. I’m sad I never got to see it.
It was weird to see an actual vacuum repairperson on Breaking Bad. I understand that that wasn’t their primary function, but it seems like in the modern world the front wouldn’t stand up or at least would be subject to extensive scrutiny.
Yes, but the TV cost inflation adjusted lowered dramatically since then.
If a TV were to cost 1000$ in the 1960 today it would cost 8$.
Source: https://www.in2013dollars.com/Televisions/price-inflation/1960-to-2025?amount=1000
Can you even find a black-and-white CRT for sale anymore?
I’m still trying to repair everything myself, but de prices of materials are skyrock…
That or the price of advancement has made things impossible to fix without swapping out entire components or just get a new one. Which has been taken advantage of by making things fail a lot sooner. So much easier to make it cheaper so it gets replaced, and it keeps the company in business and is more profitable.
