tube testers

[TwoByFour]

Originally Posted by finalmove

My dad was color blind, so me or one of my brothers would go downstairs in the evenings to call-out the color stripes on resistors and wires.

Well, that is one thing that has not changed in 100 years or so - resistors still are color coded!

I still like electronics and have an Arduino controller kit I have been playing with. Kind of fun.

[Vic Romano]

I seem to remember going to Pep Boys to have tubes tested on their machine...does that sound right?

[ogg]

My father was also a TV repairmen in the 60's so I learned how to fix just about everything electrical from him. Took vocational electronics in HS (late 60's). We lived on Merritt Island near the space center and watched all the manned/unmanned Rocket launches, as things modernized out at the cape there was tons of military surplus discarded everywhere (Hammerlund, Hallicrafters, Collins, etc) I had a great time. But in the early 70s circuit boards loaded with discrete components came on the scene and spelled the end of tube TVs. So dad went to work at the space center on the Apollo project and I got my EE at FTU and went on to software development.

I always remembered how sweet those tube amps sounded but my friends thought I was exaggerating so it took them awhile to catch up. Ha! In the past several years I have restored some old Zenth radios and amps, there's nothing quite like listening to classic rock & roll with a warm & sweet tube amp(and a beer of course). Life is good.

[MichiganGreg]

Originally Posted by TwoByFour

Well, that is one thing that has not changed in 100 years or so - resistors still are color coded!

Unless you're dealing with 0402s or 0201s I had to buy a Mantis microscope for my lab just to pick them up and watch them in my tweezers while trying to solder these darn things! And if you hear the dreaded 'click' from the tweezers before you get them in the paste...un-package another one. You'll never, never, ever find where the darn thing went.