I just remembered when I was a kid(Im on my 30’s now) we had this old “box style” television. As it got older, there were times that a white thing will appear on the screen. You can still watch the show but its annoying. Imagine watching your TV while having a white curtain in front of it. One day, I got extremely furious because I was watching Smackdown and slap the side of the TV. Then, it returned to normal. I kept doing the same solution I discovered every time the white thing appears on screen until one day it stopped functioning. 😂
In: Technology
In the old Tube TVs, the individual tubes were plugged into sockets. The sockets would sometimes get an oxide layer (especially in humid S TX) and cause problems. Dad would remove the back cover and wiggle every tube in its socket, and it did the trick. Like others said solder joints let go after so many heat/cool cycles and a good knock jiggles stuff enough to make it work. I hit an old TV hard enough to detach the shadow mask one time, and that meant an immediate shopping trip for a new TV. Sears TVs, you won’t really be missed.
Percussive maintenance still works today on certain things. Why buy an expensive car alternator when a couple of taps with a hammer will fix it? On electronics it basically has a chance of knocking contacts together where they should be (or the opposite, of course), or in mechanicals with moving parts like an alternator, has the chance of freeing up the moving part.
As a non professional restorer of all sorts, old tube radios share the same problem, when a filament of a tube (also called valve) breaks there’s no contact but if moved, the thin tungsten wire reconnects, sometimes partially fusing sometime not eventually needing replacement,
This is familiar with regular light bulbs.
What’s the first thing you do when a headlamp on your car is “burnt out” ? Slap it ! Sometimes it’s a fix
I work with some pretty old obsolete equipment at work. Our oNly way to “fix” it is poke it with a screwdriver till it starts workig
Older TVs had vacuum tubes. Think of a piece of foil inside a jar near a wire. They could move owing to thermal expansion, and things like a phase-locked loop could lose lock. A little jiggling could change, for example, the gain, enabling lock to be reacquired. Capacitors were also plates that you could adjust manually. Again, a jiggle could affect them.
The Apple III would love to pipe in here. No fans or cooling vents would make that computer fail and the fix was to lift the chassis slightly off the desk and drop it to reseat the chips. My dad had one in his office and one in his home office. Wozniak claimed it had a 100% hardware failure rate.
My dad’s home unit still worked as of 2018. When he passed away in 2019, I took it home. My friend was getting it working and when he fired it up to show me, the PSU blew. I plan on restoring it one day when I get some free time.
My dad’s employer spent around $7k for that guy thing which is $28k in 2023 money! It was handy to have because it had the same printer as the school so I could print my own report cards and attendance records.
And to add. I used to have an old Plasma screed. Way back, 2006 just a base model from Walmart.
After a year or two it would turn on and the image would be upside down. I’d give it a hearty slap and it would flip to normal. What’s up?
i had this old 14 inches tv mounted at the wall of my room. it was ancient, one with a lid on top housing channel tuners (?). after a while it started to show weird colours, so we have to give it a tap on the side to fix it. being the lazy person i am, i found 2 ways todo it from the bed. first it was a tennis ball. i just had to trow it into the wall and ricochet it to the side of the tv. it worked like a charm. then, i just found a ski pole and that worked even better.
I love how everyone is a scientist. Maybe the things jist taking a break and u slap it and it straightens up. Kinda like if u slap a living thing for “ not working properly” they get in line quick. What the explanation for that? Oxidation, lose parts, etc? Maybe it loosens the blood clots in the brain. Imma just say, I don’t know! It just does. Explain to me like I’m 5, when does the universe end? Why does anything exist… why do we have answers for everything? Is it somethung we learned from someone else who only wants credit for being smart ? What do we really know? Only what we read? Why can’t we come up with our own answers
A lot of these answers are right, but there is the phenomenon known as [whiskers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_(metallurgy)) that occurred a LOT back in the day. They are very very delicate and whacking the TV would break these delicate whiskers. Read about it! Very cool topic!
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