I think a lot of us had a start like that. I tried to build stuff with discarded valve radios and discovered that some of them had live chassis pretty quickly . Also that transfomers and selenium rectifiers liked to catch fire. My parents bought me a Radio Shack kit after I smoked my nan's kitchen out and banned me from mains stuff
Same here. Mom was a great supporter of my generally “live in the great outdoors” youthful lifestyle; while grand-dad had a big color console TV which was the holy altar of religious Sunday afternoon ballgame-watching with my uncle Frank and occasional neighbors, in our home we never had ANY TV until I bought an old 13” tube-type B&W set at a yard sale for $2.
I cleaned out the dust elephants, fired it up & noticed a periodic “kraaak-kraaaak!” as the CRT anode arced to the metal frame of the set along some unknown residue trail; I turned it off and bright boy that I was, DID unplug the set before I reached in with alcohol-damped rag to clean off the residue.
”KRAAAK-KRAAACAAAAKKKK!!!” it went, discharging the anode through several fingers; fortunately the rag went flying when I jerked my hand out of the set, because I didn’t notice it burning on the floor of the garage for a good 30 seconds as I was busy sucking on tingly fingers.
Once I’d recovered my wits, I contrived to attach an alligator wire between metal frame and a long thin screwdriver; which I then gingerly probed under the anode cap until I was satisfied no angry pixies remained lurking. Years later I would be shown the same exact technique by Mr. Basche, the high-school AV Shop foreman who gave me my start in electronics; this of course served only to reinforce my teen-ager’s conviction that I was always the smartest guy in the room...
After successfully cleaning the back of the CRT, I was rewarded with lovely dancing pixies on the front of the set, but could not pick up anything on any VHF channels, but a few ghostly images on UHF. Further digging revealed a dirty grey tube under the tuner assembly that didn’t light up (IIRC, a 6AU6...?) and so I scoured yard sales the next few weeks until I had a handful, which I took to the local Red Ten and tried on their
people-checker tube-checker until I found one that was the same, but had marginal emission and another that was a letter different but tested good.
I scurried away home with my prize, and still out of breath from pedaling as hard and fast as I could for 16 blocks, still tried the questionable exact-match tube first. Unlike the original, it glowed faintly; after a couple minutes I found I was able to tune in the local CBS station but had very poor vertical sync (Well, to me at the time it was just squiggle-screen).
With some level of trepidation, I unplugged the toasty-warm set and carefully replaced the tube with the one that was one letter off; I was now quite leery of touching anything metal inside the thing just after power-off, but reasoned that it used the same setup on the tube-checker as the correct tube, so shouldn’t be able to harm anything, and as long as I only touched glass it shouldn’t light me up either.
When the operation was complete I was rewarded with a lovely, crisp image of baseball highlights on the 6 o’clock news; tuning around the dial brought in all the big three networks, and after discovering that you needed a bow tie for UHF I was able to get some weird Italian-sounding stuff as well as religion channels and the local FOX affiliate, which would become the centerpiece of “me & mom” times watching reruns of Star Trek and Wild Wild West...
*sigh*
*mnore mnemories*