I miss such a good old day....
Dr. Mario
Posts: 331
I sure miss such a good old day (1980s to early 90s) when the TV sets, most appliances were made more reliable than it is today (except for some reputable Japanese electronics, probably ditto from Germany).
I repair most electronics on basis, and sometimes I would have to groan upon the visual evidences of the companies cutting the corners, like my Sanyo DP42849 LCD TV that's given to me, for example. Some already-so-reliable electronics are already dogged down by cheap capacitors (as mentioned in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague - there is also lists for better ones), the source of frustration in many case.... And, some VCRs are no longer built like tanks.... What's happening? What's next? Electronics so cheap that it falls apart automatically the moment you plug in? So much for bottom lines....
(BTW, I decided not to toss away my Sanyo DP42849, even though so many peoples consider it as good as doorstop, since the motherboard is already good enough but would be more than benefiting the capacitor replacement - I am still replacing all cheap LH.NOVA capacitors with Nichicon solid-polymer with half capacitance rating of the tossed-away capacitors. And, yes the board still works, so is LCD panel so it's really is worth repairing. Just need to figure out the troubles with the fluorescent inverter playing dead possum.)
I repair most electronics on basis, and sometimes I would have to groan upon the visual evidences of the companies cutting the corners, like my Sanyo DP42849 LCD TV that's given to me, for example. Some already-so-reliable electronics are already dogged down by cheap capacitors (as mentioned in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague - there is also lists for better ones), the source of frustration in many case.... And, some VCRs are no longer built like tanks.... What's happening? What's next? Electronics so cheap that it falls apart automatically the moment you plug in? So much for bottom lines....
(BTW, I decided not to toss away my Sanyo DP42849, even though so many peoples consider it as good as doorstop, since the motherboard is already good enough but would be more than benefiting the capacitor replacement - I am still replacing all cheap LH.NOVA capacitors with Nichicon solid-polymer with half capacitance rating of the tossed-away capacitors. And, yes the board still works, so is LCD panel so it's really is worth repairing. Just need to figure out the troubles with the fluorescent inverter playing dead possum.)
Comments
Unfortunately, I found it outside a appliance store, in the parking lot where people could leave old equipment to have it recycled. And not only had they just tossed it out of the car, but it had rained for a couple of days, too. Completely ruined!
A polish guy who also stopped there took a look at it and almost began crying.
It's common that poles working in Norway 'raid' these dumps and pick off working machines to clean them up and sell when they get home. (If nothing else, it usually pays for the gasoline.)
A beautiful TV like that would have fetched good money, even if it was old. It could have been the centerpice in someone's livingroom.
Other poles, not working in Norway gathr up as much cash as they can (borrowing fro neighbours and relatives, usually), then get into a car together with as many others as theycan fit, take the ferry over to Sweden. Those who doesn't have cars buy whatever theycan find as long as it has plates, runs and is roomy. Then they hit the recycling centers, secondhand stores and so on, hunting for serviceable fridges, freezers, stoves, vacuums and so on. If they can get hold of trailers they get loaded up, too. What most people think of as 'old junk' gets checked over, then sold off with a decent profit in Poland where people are more than happy to buy used.
I believe there's some of the same traffic going to a couple of the other former east-bloc countries, too.
xanatos, I agree. There are such peoples who are a tad more than just simply greedy. Much worse, some TV manufacturers were very dishonest with their customers (heard that Sanyo got sucked into class-action lawsuit. Ah, I will check... Plentiful of hits in Google, concerning the flat-panel TV. Yes, I have the TV here, it works fine except for CCFL backlight... Crazy.) Planned obsolesce is more than enough to make my face red with anger. Worse, warranties are cut so short (one reason I stopped trusting warranty), more like 6 months instead of 5 - 10 years from the yesteryear...
Gadgetman, Amen. Older products are still generally usable compared to the electronics of today: older electronics can last 30 years or more with general maintenance listed in the manuals (gee, they don't print the manuals this way anymore!), while a TV that you buy today won't last a year. Geez. Even so, older electronics' casings look pretty, a good match for Victorian-era woodworking style (bet it cost so much to even do that). Two things I like about them: artistic tastes and longevity.
Yet, what I found out and learned (on my own and from browsing Internet), is that it's 100% possible to lengthen the electronic life expectancy, entirely by yourself, if you're handy with soldering iron. If you want to attempt replacing cheap wet electrolytic (I had to say it, to avoid confusion, though) with Japanese solid-polymer capacitors like I did with my TV, go with half of the original rating - like for example: Fuhjyyu 1,000 uF 10V, and you want to pop in Nichicon (or Panasonic) branded solid-polymer capacitor, go for 560 / 470uF 10V so you don't stress the DC rail out. Here's an example (photo) of the Taiwanese LH.NOVA capacitors being swapped by the Japanese Nichicon solid-polymer capacitor, right in my TV's CPU VRM (where my finger's pointing to).
Luckily I was able to easily replace 4 1000uf capacitors and it works great (knock on wood)....
My TV's motherboard works fine, but I decided to recap it anyways, as they're bound to fail sooner, anyways. (the hotter the TV gets, the quicker the cheap capacitors die. Sometimes in spectacular manners.)
But there's more to the story. That stuff was built rugged because it had to last. I remember my parents paying somewhere around $500 for a 19-inch "portable" color TV -- by "portable" they meant it had a handle on each end, and two fairly strong guys could move it around without a dolly. In 1975, that was enough money to pay the mortgage on a nice home for four or five months. The first VCR's were mechanical marvels; our first had mechanical play and record "buttons" like audio cassette recorders of the same era, which would physically move parts of the mechanism into place when you pressed them. But tracking was iffy, and it was common to borrow a tape from a friend and find your machine wouldn't play it very well.
Early computers were all expensive, underpowered, impractical, and incompatible, and programs written for one wouldn't work on another, even the next generation made by the same manufacturer. Mine had a nifty problem. It had eight 4116 8 bit by 16K dynamic RAM chips which required four power supplies. In the chip specs it said it was *imperative* that the 12V supplies come on before the 5V supplies. The maker of my cheap surplus machine solved this problem by leaving the 12 volt supplies on all the time; the power switch switched only the 5V supplies. Alas, some people decided it was convenient to plug their computer into an outlet strip. If you applied power with the ON switch on, sometimes the 5V supply would win the race, and in that event... wait for it ... the RAM chips PHYSICALLY EXPLODED like eight little fifteen dollar firecrackers. And for added lulz, they were soldered in place.
While there is nothing quite like the feel of the tuning dial of a massive Hallicrafters shortwave receiver or the booming harmonics of a powerful tube audio amp, it's also nice to have equipment that doesn't need enough AC power to run an air conditioner, that doesn't generate enough heat to cook an egg, that doesn't fail every year or two because a tube got old, that doesn't run voltages high enough to kill you if you aren't careful messing around inside, that can fit in your pocket instead of requiring a strong table, and with mechanical parts that can maintain unbelievably tight mechanical tolerances without finicky adjustments that go out periodically.
One reason we throw out stuff we once would have fixed is that replacement is cheaper than even the opening act of a fix. If it costs $50 for a service technician's time to open the case and make a cursory evaluation, and $30 for a new external CD-ROM, and $50 to upgrade to a DVD writer, it's landfill time for the CD-ROM. That's not really a good thing for the raw material stream or the environment, but you can't blame the people who make that determination. The kids who do fix things like that because their time is cheap are actually doing us all a service, and I try to guide my old stuff into their hands when possible.
But sometimes a device really isn't worth fixing. Really old CD players skipped where new ones don't, and nowadays we use flash storage (especially for portable play) anyway. An old TV set is fun for funky nostalgia, but the picture really isn't all that good next to a modern flatscreen and it won't work at all with a lot of devices that emit not quite standard NTSC video. An old radio has a fun sound but, modern capacitor plague notwithstanding, their capacitors are prone to dry up and explode under power. And smooth radio dials were nice, but there really wasn't such a thing as exact frequency indication before digital dials.
Sometimes the modern stuff that looks like it's made of aluminum foil and Saran wrap really is better, just because the technology is that much better and it doesn't have to be built like a tank to work at all.
But even so, ancient Sprague ATOM capacitors were more fun - When I was 12 (or 13?), I got bored and wired up the disposable Advantix camera's flash inverter to the 550V 100uF, and it was SO BRIGHT, way brighter than the regular capacitor I removed.... (I had the afterimage for 15 minutes... Lesson learned: never look down on the Xenon flashlamp tube...)
Also, vacuum tubes are still prized, even to me, as they are also more forgivable toward electrical abuses, and won't really care if the electrical input was digital or analog signals. Most "golden ears" folks still love it because the vacuum tubes keep the signal amplitudes as nearly identical as the input, compared to the regular transistors (except for IGBTs, they works similar to electron-beam triodes).
About the last comment, again, I agreed. However, there are some companies who still care about the reliability, which I can take my Gigabyte video card as an example. (AMD Radeon HD 4670 VPU with 1GB GDDR III memory - they're encrusted with either Panasonic or Nichicon solid-polymer capacitors. One caveat-emptor, though.... It was flashed with flaky firmware - I forced the firmware update with newer BIOS for the video card, it works fine now.) There are still some newer electronics that's built like tanks. DIY computers are also much more reliable (only if you get the right motherboard(s) and ATX SMPS - they're the parts that can either make or break the game.)
So what's next? I am going to try and probe a tad deeper starting at optoisolators' LED legs up to the op-amp ICs (two ST 224A and one TI LM258 ICs) to find out why it keeps playing dead possum.
I really miss radiograms. We had ours for 20 years and it was secondhand when we bought it, it was a very high quality piece for the day, lovely rich sound from the tubes and Goodman speakers driven by these huge transformers, I think the amps were 50w Quad seperates. The turntable was a Garrard auto changer but it played well and didnt wreck the records, mine still play even today. I'd love to have another one if I could find it or else I'll have to build it. I think the cabinetry was partially responsible for the quality of the sound, the speaker enclosures were sort of horns, an arrangement of baffles creating a series of ever increasing sized rectangular boxes. You could feel them pumping the air in front of them but the solid woodwork ate the vibrations and the records never skipped even at full volume which was jolly loud.
Last but not least I miss a decent geared down tuner with proper air gap tuning capacitors and a 'magic eye' visual indicator of signal strength. In the UK where I lived then, there were lots of little radio stations coming in from Europe and you needed a sensitive but solid tuner that made it easy to locate a signal and would hold its position. These were real high quality mechanisms and despite people saying tubes burn out I never had to replace any except one ECC83 because the vacuum went on it. I cant remember the manufacturer of that radiogram, I sort of vaguely remember 'Invicta' but I'm not sure if that was a model name or a makers name. I might be confusing it with the one my dad had which wasnt stereo. Ours was about six foot long and 3 x 3 section, it looked like a sideboard, highly polished wood, really a nice piece.
Lately I have been buying things which do not work brand new out of the box!
Luckily I can fix/modify things and get them to work properly. Sometimes takes a bit of re-design.
As for buying new things, I'm now sometimes buying old instead of new. Like I needed a new vacuum cleaner, so instead of new, I bought an old 1940's Kirby vacuum cleaner (all metal) which is still working perfectly fine - $5 at a 2nd hand store.
And I live in a rural area where the electricity goes out frequently. I had a new electronic phone which kept all the other phones from working when the power went out (phones should work if no electricity). So I got fed up with that and replaced all my electronic phones with these...
ARG! Not me man.... I tried so hard to learn those, it just never worked for me. I'm not talking a point and shoot, but a good old clunky SLR manual setting Minolta or Pentax camera. There's no telling how much film I wasted and never did succeed. I was so pleased when I got my DSLR. I use the manual function on a regular basis and can tune the image to look exactly like I planned. Finally I can be a photog instead of wasting $12 per roll or poorly shot pictures.
"But it's so heavy, it makes my arm tired using a heavy vacuum" Oh brother
Of course, that pales in comparison to the 3 million-mile 1966 Volvo: http://www.roamingtimes.com/A/articles/3-million-miles-volvo.asp
I have various digitals, but almost never use them because I find that the 'no cost to click' makes me not take the time to properly set up the shoot. With an oldfashioned analog, I know that every time I push the button I use a piece of film which actually costs me money, and which can't be reused. Makes me a little bit more careful when using an analog...
Among my cameras is a Zenit Horizon 202 'Perfect', a panoramic which takes a 120degree picture, with no distortion or unfocused areas. (Swing-lens design.) It uses a well-proven 28mm lens assemble from one of their old (KGB-era) spy cameras. Unfortunately, it's built using traditional Soviet-era work ethics, too. A whole year's worth of lenses lacks the coating you find on most modern lenses. And about 10% of cameras that left the factory just didn't work. (Mostly, the seals around the drum the lens assembly is mounted in, were rotten and let in light) And that was considered 'good'...
(Lucky that the seller was willing to swap mine for one with good seals)
You have to be extremely careful about camera shake, but when it works, it takes a panoramic picture in a second.
I'd hate to do this with a 'modern' camera; taking a lot of pictures, stitching them together on the PC and hoping against all hope that there's no persons, cars or even clouds that have moved so much that they appear several places in the final picture. Or that there's a straight line somewhere in the picture that ends up broken up into all kinds of angles in the finished picture.
Sure, processing the film is a pain... Takes me half an hour to process B/W film.
(But I have room for 4 or rolls in my tank, so... up to 23 x 4 = 92 pictures processed in that time.)
Perparing the chemicals and setting up usually takes half an hour, too, so I usually wait until I have two full loads or more before starting.
Vacuum cleaners...
Yes, oldfashioned vacuums usually lasts longer than new models, but...
Modern vacuums use less power for the same amount of suck, so to speak...
They also have better filters, so that they don't spread the smallest stuff all over.
(Filters can be added to some models, though)
Personally, I use a central vacuum hidden away in a closet and which vents the output air outside.
Other things where modern stuff is better is wood-fired ovens.
A modern 'clean-burning' model is about 80% effective.
A 'normal' oven is about 50% effective, and also produces 10 times more soot and small particles.
(An open fireplace is about 30% effective, and also tends to lower the temperature in the restof the house)
In fact, it's now illegal to install the old ovens here in Norway.
(Moving an oven so far that you need to make a new hole in the chimney is considered a 'new install')
The only exception is antiques, and then you need to ask permission first.
The Volvo... I wonder how many stars it would get in an Euro-NCAP test...