Brief detour into RCA-ville. My CTC-11 tuners were helped by opening them up and cleaning contacts with Q-tips dipped in DeOxit. Spraying cleaner all over the place is a Bad Idea. Don't use anything abrasive on the contacts.

Phil Nelson

A slightly more detour into RCA land:

I promise I will not spray anything into my RCA tuner. I cleaned it about 25 years ago, and it is time to do it again.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled program, in progress. :D

One of the other major factors in break downs was of course the heat generated by tubes. I thought about putting whisper fans in the back of a couple sets or just leave the backs off.

always use a silicon based cleaner. Remember when your dad used to yell at you for turning the tuner too fast. That is actually better for the contacts than just setting there getting oxidized.

I remember that as a kid. The picture tube could go bad and dad would say it was because the kids were changing channels too fast. There was also the belief that if you left a set playing on an unoccupied channel it was bad for the tubes.

Had a fifth grade teacher who was real big on conspiracy theories and that sort of thing. He said: "hold your arm up to the TV screen and change the channel. The hair on your arm will stand on end. That is from radiation going in to your arm. It goes in there and stays, it can't get out." Did I say he was a teacher?

As kids, we were always told to stay several feet back from a color TV because of radiation. There had always been the x-ray warnings on TVs, but I think that when color sets started becoming more common, and people found out that the crts worked at a lot higher voltage, they assumed that the color sets were dangerous.

:D I had a math teacher in grammar school who thought pi=22/7 exactly. He was within a percent, but it's not exactly. :D Another teacher, of English, thought that the definition of a sentence, being a "complete thought", could be used as a test to see if a bunch of words strung together was really a sentence or not. :D This was 45 years ago, seems the schools back then were just as bad as today's... :thumbsdn:

Oh, and all those teachers hated TV.

Most teachers thought that tv was bubblegum for the mind.

My parents always told me TV rots your brain.

In the late 1960s, I knew a couple that had a color TV, but would turn the color off on most shows. This was done to "save the color" for the special shows, in hopes of making the TV last longer. As you can see, they had no concept of how a TV worked.

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You have to remember that these people were in rural Oklahoma in the 1960s. They, like my grandmother, probably only had a 6th grade education. BTW, my grandmother and grandfather only got electricity in 1950.

You will often find that what people like that may lack in education they make up for in wisdom and kindness.

True in most cases. They also had knowedge of things I will never know or need to know such as how to handle a team of horses or pick cotten.

From what I have heard, manually picking cotten is backbreaking work.