LizzieMaine
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JimWagner said:TV's and radios used to be easy to repair. And needed it often. Tube equipment requires high voltages, high currents, generate a lot of heat and tubes burn out as often as light bulbs. That's why you used to be able to run down to the corner drugstore and find a tube tester and a supply of tubes. Today I have tv's that are over 20 years old and radios over 30 that have never needed any kind of repair at all. That wouldn't have happened with tube technology.
I'll take issue with some of this, as someone who's worked on vintage tube electronics both as a hobby and in the workplace, for over twenty-five years.
*Some* types of tubes burn out as quickly as light bulbs, but the fact is those are very specialized types -- most notably those used in high-demand circuits like the horizontal output section of a TV set. Specifically, those used in TV sets built between about 1957 and 1967, when manufacturers began building down to a price rather than emphasizing quality -- the first real era of Planned Obsolescence. The days of the regular visit by the TV Repair Man were largely confined to this era -- if you owned a late-forties-vintage DuMont or RCA television, you owned a quality instrument that was in fact built to last, but if you were watching a 1957 Muntz -- well, you got what you paid for.
Other tubes, the sort used in most radios and earlier television sets, very very rarely "burn out." I've had a 1937 Philco console in my living room since 1984, under regular heavy use -- several hours each day, usually -- and in all that time, I've had to replace one tube, a rectifier that popped its filament one morning. All other tubes in the set are the same ones that were in it when I bought it, and most of them were evidently in the set when it was first sold. Tubes are very very rarely to blame for problems in household-grade radios, and the propaganda about replacing them regularly was largely the result of aggressive salesmanship from tube companies, not anything relating to real life conditions in the field.
Usually the components that fail are paper capacitors, which were the cause of most repair jobs in the Era, and which jobs usually cost the set owner a couple of dollars. Most independent radio repair shops of the day were shoestring operations -- the majority of repairmen worked for radio dealers, who could support repair service as a loss leader.
As far as other consumer goods go, some were indeed junk -- the sort of stuff you'd get at Woolworth's or Western Auto wouldn't likely last more than a few years, not too different from the Wal-Mart appliances you get today. But I'd venture to say that the percentage of junk to quality was quite a bit different from that of today, and I say this as someone who uses vintage household appliances exclusively. My 65-year-old Kelvinator refrigerator, which I've owned since 1988, has outlasted *three* of my mother's modern refrigerators, and if you take a look at the works, you'll immediately see why.