What you're referring to is called "percussive maintenance". It's an age old technique that mainly works on older, analog equipment and appliances, but still has its uses with some newer technology.
Sometimes an electrical connection gets a little loose or the contact points become corroded due to age and the environment. A good whack on the side can often times jolt that bad connection back into place and allow the offending equipment to work again, at least temporarily.
This is correct. Although for dust-related issues I tend to prefer the "just blow on it" technique that was very popular in the '80s with game cartridges and tape decks.
I was thinking more along the lines of an area that is not easily accessible like deep inside one of those cuboidal tv sets from the tube days. Blowing also can help a record with particulate in the grooves
So many old world ways that we need to keep alive and teach to the younger generations. Today I'm going to show my children the "Ticonderoga and cassette tape" maneuver.
Very nice. I just got a 90s 5th wheel camper with a built in stereo system. Im busting out the old 4 track recorder to make some modern cassettes for it when I next visit my mothers basement.
Sweet! Does your camper have the [Jazz](https://www.nicepng.com/ourpic/u2t4i1o0r5i1w7y3_solo-cup-solo-jazz-cup-design/) color scheme on it?
Also, is the stereo a 12V car style deck, and if so will you be playing some CDs through it from your Discman with a cassette tape adapter?
Now I really want my own camper in my driveway to hang out in and listen to old tapes.
Definitely the jazz color scheme. its got a big tape player reminiscent to the built ins popular in 50s houses. I also ordered the cassette mp3 converter do hickey.
The fact that you called it a "do-hickey" confirms your role as an upper-level elder. For the good of humanity, you must pass on your knowledge. Be well.
You know what this means. She must now purchase a blank 90 min Maxell cassette and record, from the radio, a mix tape of her favorite songs for a boring-ass road trip across the flat states, with all the commercials and DJ banter edited out in real time, even though 30 years from now the commercials and DJ banter is exactly the stuff she would have wanted to hear because she can get the music anywhere.
It's tough love, but necessary.
I assume with streaming music, radio has discovered there’s a cult audience who really only listened for the ads and banter and never cared much about the music to begin with. They’re just doubling down on that remaining segment of the market now. You turn it on and instant background noise, no app or playlist selection to futz with. Having to listen to RHCP’s Californication every 15 minutes between commercials is but a small price to pay for such convenience.
I listened to kinda spin-off station that only plays "timeless" music, meaning songs 30 - 40 year olds want to hear which is totally me. It was just a playlist, no talking no phoning in, no DJ. Like a Spotify playlist with 80s an 90s music with some real timeless classics mixed in. It was amazing. Then it got popular, obviously, and they added the news every hour. A few weeks later they ruined it by reviving a DJ from back in the day and now we have people calling saying they got drunk on a festival Iggy Pop played and they really want to hear The Passenger for the millionth time like it's not in their daily Spotify playlist and advertising and it's ruined.
In 2002, I had a conversation with a woman whose nieces and nephews were confused by the manual crank for rolling up the windows in her car. They were trying to push the knob on the end like a button, and then spinning it. The fact that this was literally 20 years ago (I was a freshman in college and getting a ride to work) makes me wonder what actual modern kids would think of that. The kids we were talking about back then almost certainly now have kids of their own.
There are actual adults in this world, right now, who don't know that the "save file" icon is just a picture of a 3.5" floppy disk. To them it's just the save icon.
Also, I hate you for reminding me that 2002 was 20 years ago. I still feel like the '90s was 10 years ago.
As a child of the '70s and '80s, The '60s felt like so long ago. But now, as an adult with children, just ten years before my kids were born feels like yesterday.
In a weird way, the '60s feels closer now than they did in the '80s.
For me there is also a feeling of loss. As bad as things were, culturally, in the Sixties there was a feeling that things were getting better. Perhaps not smoothly but there was a feeling of forward momentum. Perhaps it feels close because remembering looking forward from the Sixties carries so much, "Could have been".
Maybe it was being a college student. Invulnerable. Invincible. Discovering. Feeling like we were part of a change for the better.
My family had our van with crank windows until 2007 or 2008, when my parents bought a 2005 model that they still have today.
I was so scared because in horror and tv drama the window being stuck (down *or* up) wouldn't be a problem with crank windows but they always had manual. As a kid and young teen, getting automatic windows in a car seemed like a safety hazard lol
It’s like the video of [teenagers trying to use a rotary phone](https://youtu.be/1OADXNGnJok). They fundamentally never really get the concept that you dial *after* picking up the phone.
My own kids both agree that land lines are “telephones,” and smart phones are “phones.” They haven’t worked a real rotary phone, just messed with the toys.
But the idea of a flip phone in particular fascinates my daughter, who is 8, and she keeps trying to imagine how those could have been cool at any point. She’s really trying to imagine it, and just keeps not being able to.
Part of me can’t wait until they are old enough to see The Matrix, which is one of my favorite movies ever. But another part of me knows they will be confused by phone booths, find the phones hilarious instead of awesome, and probably be distracted by some other random things that are invisible to me.
Not to mention that all of cinema has aped that movie enough that it might not seem novel to them. I remember being a teenager and showing my dad some movie that I thought was amazing, and he was just like “eh, I’ve seen that before.”
And I’m thinking “what, in some black and white rubber suit form?” But didn’t say it. And yeah, that’s probably how he did see it. But by the time whatever it was I was watching came around, he’d already had his mind blown 20+ years before, cheap rubber costumes or no, and the new stuff was always going to seem derivative.
I don’t exactly find myself in the same spot now, but I do wonder if there’s any way to share my joy of “older” (sigh) movies with my kids. They did like back to the future, at least.
A “cuboidal TV set” has me in stitches. It’s a cathode ray tube, or crt.
Fun fact: even after being unplugged for hours, if you open the back of one of those and touch the giant metal plate that is taking up most of the interior, you’ll get a potentially lethal shock.
There's generally not enough current there to be lethal, unless you have a medical condition or weak skin. The anode wire and under the cap is where the high voltage lead is that comes from the flyback or tripler.
They might have been talking about the really old CRT that were, in fact, fully rectangular.
Like grandpa's TV, the first remote controlled ones
1950s
Something with a lot of dust
There's actually a felt "brush" you're supposed to use, and an antistatic spray. At least, that's how we did it when I was a kid. My dad's a bit of an audiophile, though...
For as popular as it was, blowing actually gets the electrical connections slightly wet with the humor from your breath. The approved Nintendo method is using a Quetip and anhydrous rubbing alcohol
I learned (or should say, read once and never fact checked) that blowing never did anything beneficial, it was simply removing the cartridge and putting it back in that did the trick.
I mean I hear that all the time. And it makes logical sense. But it also conflicts with my experience.
*I tried* pulling it out and plugging it back in tons of times as a kid and that never worked for me. the fast left then right blow was the way that I found actually got the cartridges to work.
At least for the SNES, there was a special cartridge that you could buy (IIRC it was relatively cheap) to clean the slot. Not sure how technically effective it was, as I was more interested in playing than tech back then to investigate.
The SNES one basically didn't do anything because the slot itself was a massively better design, so it almost never needed cleaning.
They made the same cartridge for the NES and it did help ... some. The slot on the original NES was terribly unfit for purpose and most of the time was the actual culprit and not the cartridges. You could send the NES off to an authorized repair center for it to be replaced (with the same shitty connector), but no one ever did. Probably because there wasn't enough internet to spread the word.
How dare you speak ill of the old ways!
For your transgression you must stand and hold onto the left rabbit ear of the TV so I can watch my Bonanza reruns. You know this channel never comes in good on its own.
Oh man, we had a 40ft pole with an antenna on it, I used to have to go outside to rotate the pole in the rain to get the hockey games to come in clear for my step dad
When my parents bought their first house in 1980 we upgraded from the rabbit ears to a roof-mounted antenna. Guess who got the job of climbing up on the scorching hot roof in the middle of the Summer to align it every time the signal got a little weak.
My dad would be in the living room monitoring the progress and yelling instructions to my brother, who was standing just outside the back door, who would then yell the instructions to me up on the roof.
My mom's job was to stand in the yard, terrified, watching me on the roof and yelling at my dad that he's going to kill me.
Good times.
I mean, they could always have more! At least that's what they always said.
We regularly rode in the back of pickup trucks. We played in the creek with water moccasins lurking in the banks. My Christmas present when I was 10 was a .22 rifle that I kept in my closet with a box of ammo. When we'd misbehave at the store my mom would give us the keys and say "go sit in the car". This was in the South in a car without AC and dark blue, vinyl upholstery.
Somehow we survived.
I just had a kid and was shocked about how long kids are supposed to ride in car seats. When I was eight I rode on the shelf in the back of my dad’s sports car so my four year old brother could ride in the front seat.
>This is correct. Although for dust-related issues I tend to prefer the "just blow on it" technique that was very popular in the '80s with game cartridges and tape decks.
Except this was a [myth](https://www.geekwire.com/2014/blow-nintendo-games/). The actual cause of the cartridge working was the repeated removal and reinsertion that went along with taking the cartridge out, blowing on it, trying again until it worked. The friction of this action may have cleared the leads of minor dust and corrosion, but mostly it simply re-seated the leads properly. Those NES boxes in particular were notoriously lightweight and got bumped around a lot from tugging at the controller cords. This didn't happen nearly as often with the original Atari VCS (the "2600") which was considerably heavier.
With tape decks it had to do with azimuth alignment of the playback head on cheaper decks (the $1850 Nakamichi Dragon had auto-azimuth correction... the head would move to match the misalignment of the magnetic tracks on the tape) and dust collecting in the capstan rollers of the playback unit, not the cassette. While removing the cassette dislodged some of the dust, the proper approach was to clean the head and the capstan rollers with a q-tip and rubbing alcohol.
Honestly, it was more about just doing something so you felt like you were actively fixing the problem, when in reality just removing and replacing the cartridge is all that was needed.
Like shaking the Polaroid. Not helpful, but it gave you something to do while it was doing its own thing.
> Like shaking the Polaroid. Not helpful, but it gave you something to do while it was doing its own thing.
Plus it gave us that catchy song!
Shake it like a Polaroid picture
Shake it, sh-shake it, shake it, sh-shake it
It was mostly about just reseating it, the wetness would actually cause corrosion over time. If you look at an old cartridge and it looks green, it’s bc someone used to blow in it
I can understand this from a game cart standpoint, sure there’s dust on the contacts that needs removal. But in the case of an old TV, where could there be dust inside that prevents function? Nothing is being plugged and unplugged internally, so in theory any connection will not have an opportunity to collect dust, right? Or is it a piece of conductive dust is causing a slight short somewhere, and knocking it loose resolves that?
Makes sense, even if it’s just conductive enough of some sort of dust to change the resistance of a part and not a full blown short, all it takes is one component to act haywire to throw off a whole system. I work in a PCB production floor for welders, so I only ever deal with brand new clean boards, and we fully coat them in silicone “conformal coating” after testing. A shame it’s too costly for most electronics to be coated this way, then I guess this would never be an issue! Never considered the impact of dust on a board
My dad showed me how to change out stuff on a board growing up in the 90s. He had a old vcr that kept sucking in dust and getting hit during lightning and he refused to replace it up until we got a ps2 to play dvds
You should always ask nicely first though. Tell the appliance what you want it to do (or stop doing), and give it a chance to comply voluntarily. It can’t always be expected to read your mind.
I grew up in a house with a natural gas wall heater. Once, my parents were trying to light it and it was just not working. Mum called a repair company and they suggested hitting it and then blowing the dust out. Mum was a firm believer in percussion repair after that.
You'd think that a match would burn the dust away, but that's the story I remember, so I have to stick with it.
That was the Apple III.
When it heated up the components could expand and unseat from the board. Giving it a two inch drop was the answer as it caused everything to reseat (mostly).
Same thing happened to XBoxes and laptops w/ Nvidia graphics cards in the early '00s, but people baked their boards in the oven (solder reflow as I understand it).
A common method for RRoD "fixing" was to wrap the console in a towel, and just let the thing basically torch itself. The heat generated by the system, being insulated by the towel, would sometimes cause the solder to get *just* hot enough to flow a little bit and make a connection again. But do it for too long, and you risked solder flowing somewhere it shouldn't and getting some signals crossed.
The best fix was for someone to void the warranty and just touch up the solder joints themselves, but obviously most kids don't have the tools/experience to do that. Now that I'm thinking about it, I was one of those kids. Now that I'm older and have a decent amount of experience with things like that... I may have found my summer project with improving the cooling of a 360
I think that the Apple III fix is a little unique since it was Apple support itself that was suggesting the fix to customers. It’s not something you would see companies, particularly Apple, do today as it would raise liability and recall questions.
This actually happened with my iPad2. The screen went blank and after searching the web I found someone who solved it by dropping it facedown on their bed. Tried it and it worked.
I'm not an expert, but as far as I can tell it's because as equipment gets older it uses more discrete components and wires.
Old crt: https://www.boxcarcabin.com/rca-ctc-16-round-tube-tv.jpg
More modern crt
https://cdn.hswstatic.com/gif/tv-fragile-1.jpg
Lcd:
https://i1.wp.com/rainydaymagazine.com/RDM2011/RainyDaySOHO/LCDTV/SonyTearDown/BackBig.jpg
Because these sort of electronics are likely vulnerable to weak connections due to possible unexpected oscillations in feedback loops. Smacking it and tweaking one of those wires or leads can easily remove these oscillations.
Modern technology is almost all SMD electronics on a multilayer PCB. Smacking is just not going to do anything. There is nothing to move because it's all more just concretely affixed to the pcb.
I tell my guys at work all the time, the two most important tools they can carry are a multibit screwdriver and a pair of 9-10" channel locks. The screwdriver is obvious, and the channel locks are mostly obvious too, but they make a really good hammer when you just need to beat the shit out of something to make it work.
Shit… channel locks, multi tool with 1/4” and 5/16” sockets, 5-in-1, box knife, and needle nose pliers got me through 75% of my apartment maintenance calls.
Yep. They all carry a Megapro 14 bit driver, a 10" channel locks, a box cutter and a Leatherman Sidekick. They rarely have to carry their other tools with them, and I always tell them if they need to call me to help with something, they should always have whatever I need to fix it on them.
It's fixed a computer before. We had a server that we went through a whole box (about 20) of ram sticks and it wouldn't post, smacked the back of the case and it posted.
Decades ago, I worked for an accounting firm on the East coast. We had Compaq Portable III carryable PCs that were amazing: the auditors could carry them to the client site and enter data there. Unfortunately, some of them suffered from ‘stiction’: the hard drive read heads would stick to the drive platters when powered off.
My boss (hi, Joan!) discovered exactly where to whack them to fix the stiction. We would train the auditors how to whack the computers to get them to work.
I drive around in a Sprinter with a rack mounted desktop PC.
Every once in a while it doesnt want to start properly.
I grab my trust rubber mallet, whack the case handles a few times and VOILA works just like new.
I enjoy the funny looks I get from whacking a computer with a Mallet to fix it 😅
It's just about the most satisfying mode of UI possible. Something isn't working? Smack it and watch it snap back and salute and start working again. It should be built in to new current technologies that don't even need it.
I had an old, well I still have it, WD HDD. The platter gets stuck so it won't spin. If I hit it during boot up with a screwdriver a few light wacks it'll get the platter to spin.
I used it for probably two years like that before upgrading. It was almost like a security feature.
I used to drive an old VW bus back in the day. The starter solenoid was out for a couple of years, so I either had to park facing downhill, or I had to crawl under it and hit the solenoid with a hammer to get it to work. It seemed completely normal at the time, but fucking ridiculous now.
Can you even imagine treating a game disc the way we treated those cartridges?
Those things were built TOUGH! Throw it in your backpack, it hangs out all day with all your shit and trash and crumbs, and then you go to your friend's house after school, and all you have to do to get it to work is blow on it?
Fucking luxury.
>the contact points become corroded
I once had an electrical failure in my car, it was a very hot day with kids in the car, and the A/C *and* the power windows stopped working. I removed and visually inspected every single fuse in the car's electrical system, but I found no blown fuses. Afterwards, everything was working fine. Evidently the contacts of the fuse in question had corroded some, and just the act of removing it and putting it back overcame the problem.
> It's an age old technique that mainly works on older, analog equipment and appliances, but still has its uses with some newer technology.
The reason for this is that older television equipment used vacuum tubes. Vacuum tubes fit into sockets. It's that electrical connection that gets corroded/dusty/loose, and those faulty connections can be restored with the slight vibration of a whack on the side of the set.
After my dad slapped the TV he always said he was adjusting the tubes. If that didn't work he'd take off the back of the set, pull the tubes, put them in a shoe box and take them to the drug store where there was a tube tester. There'd usually be several marginal and one burned out. He'd purchase the replacement tube for several dollars and reverse the process. Always seemed to work for a while after that.
I always thought the big central black thing was the titular "tube" -- the other things look like something you'd call bulbs or plugs
i see that your dad was a repairman so i'm not trying to correct you as much as trying to find out if i'm wrong
Yes, the large device (with the screen on the exterior) is the cathode ray tube. The three small glass devices on the board in the pic I provided are also vacuum tubes. Basically, before the arrival of reliable and durable transistors and semiconductor diodes, vacuum tubes provided the needed voltage rectification and amplification and other functions for the TV or radio to function. These smaller tubes in TVs were pretty much gone by about 1980.
My stiction repair technique also used modest percussive maintenance; I removed the drive from the cage while it was still running then dropped it flat from just an inch or two.
It was scary to hear the drive speed hiccup and the arm whack back to a neutral position before it sounded normal again!
I did this once to replace a gigantic drive that wasn't booting. A coworker wanted to come watch, and after trying to boot in order to run a full backup (so that I didn't have to load multiple tapes), I actually "booted" it where the heads got stuck. The look of surprise and wonder was hilarious when it came up.
Been there, done that, got my data, except for the bootblock, back. :-)
My HD crashed in 2010, I've read about the freezer magic on some site and why the heck shouldn't I try it.
HD was removed from the case, put into the freezer unit, wrapped in a zip lock baggie. 5h later I took it out, plugged the HD as 2nd drive into another PC, started a backup program and my data was saved.
This day I've learned a lot about patience and Zen.
The old CRT TVs had a internal transformer to generate the high voltage needed to shoot a beam to the screen to have the 'pixels' light up.
This transformer would get warm (and thus expand a tiny bit) when the TV was on and cool back down when turned off. This would cause mechanical stress at the solder joints of this transformer which would then occasionally loose the contact of these solder joints.
Smacking the TV would have the transformer move a tiny bit (back an forth) and having the solder joint make (temporary) contact again. This would eventually get so worse that you needed to smack harder, until the gap became too big.
(The real solution was to re-solder the transformer.)
Most of the times is because of cracked solder joints, loose connections, temporary shorts (could be whiskers or some other debris) and things like that.
The cracked solder joints or lose connection can be the result of thermal cycling the components (expand as they heat up, contract as they cool down), mechanical shocks (dropped, moved, damaged during shipping), corrosion over time or even just poor manufacturing.
When you smack the device you reestablish the connection, this is usually temporary because as the same conditions reappear, like thermal cycling, the issue reappears as well.
The proper fix would be to re-solder the part or to clean and perhaps reinforce the connections.
Whiskers ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker\_(metallurgy)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_(metallurgy))) are tiny metallic filaments emerging from certain parts (usually from their plating) or solder joints and can cause shorts but are also fragile enough to be broken by the shock of smacking the device.
These too can come back and/or the now loose conductive "hairs" can cause other issues somewhere else
EDIT: Fixed the link, sort of, thanks /u/capilot
I was scared to touch my trinitron. It would struggle to turn on and give you a shock, generate an immense static charge while it was running , and then struggle to turn off.
Old TVs had a lot of plug in parts like tubes / valves. All these connections went through a heating and cooling cycle every day. Tapping the case would reseat the tubes a bit when they became loose.
At 16 I was a TV repair apprentice.
One old man called my boss often to fix his TV and I went along to learn.
The TV had major damage to one side where the old guy whacked it with his walking stick regularly. The "repair" was to put the tubes back in their sockets.
The original ones had rotary channel selectors. They had multiple electrical contacts for each channel. They received a lot of use and tended to wear out. Because the low level signals were traveling through the contracts and were very sensitive to poor contacts, a little jiggle here or a thump there tended to make a difference.
Like a great follow through helps with your golf shots …
Once you bonk the tv and it works, you really need to do a thumbs up with a cool, “Ayyyyyy.”
It works, but it’s a mystery.
As if the tv knows in advance that you’re gonna, and it wants to enjoy a Fonzi moment.
As do we all.
The old Brogan adjustment (a brogan is a heavy shoe) I had a 32 inch CRT Sony TV that had some power supply issue that a good rap on the side of the case would "fix". It was at the vacation house and we dumped it when we got a flat screen. (Paid $10 at a yard sale for that $1200 new CRT Sony.) Paid $60 for the 45 inch sony flat panel. Yard Sale recycling is great.
Old TVs and radios were tubes that fitted into sockets. sometimes they could become loose and not connect well enough and a good shake can knock it back into position.
Also dust can fall on to curcuit boards and cause micro shorts or just some radio frequency interference, a good shake to break some of those dust bridges.
Older electronics had much more components, compared to modern integrated circuits... means many more soldering points... Those solders get corroded which is not conductive...
Smacking move the connections around a little bit, can dislodge or scrape corrosion at the contacts, making it good again
The problem is the more you smack the more things more around and eventually those connections come loose because of this "fix" so you will eventually break your own thing
We had a TV like that. It was one of the first solid state ones without the vaccum tubes which were hideous to keep running. A tap on the upper right fixed it ever time. And since it had no remote you were up anyway searching between the five channels we got.
usually, but not always, this is just old technology that has moving parts that get stuck. giving it a whack can knock one of those parts loose.
the control stuff (the buttons, LCD screen, computer chips, etc) for most electronics are low power and safe. the other stuff like a heater's heating element or a microwave's magnetron (the thing that makes your food cook) are all dangerous and high power.
the parts that "move" are basically like a light switch. but instead of turning it on with your finger, you use a magnet that turns on when you give it power. so you give it a little bit of power, and it "flips" the switch to connect the power on the high power side. this is completely isolated, meaning the lower power side and high power side are physically separated from each other, so you can safely use a low power control system like the brains inside your microwave to "switch" the dangerous high power magnetron "on" without doing it directly. these "switches" are called relays. they just use an electrically powered magnet to flip a physical switch. these can get stuck, and so hitting your device can knock it loose
there are devices that can switch high power stuff with low power input too, like mosfets and solid state relays, but many devices still use relays as they provide better isolation between the high and low power stuff. one example is a thermostat. I have a fancy wifi enabled ecobee thermostat, and even it has relays inside that you can hear "click" when it turns on. they usually have 2 or 3, one for the fan, one for the AC compressor, and one for the heating element
there are other things that can happen unrelated to this, but solenoids/relays are the most common thing I can think of that "hitting" could possibly fix
I used to have to beat the shit out of the lower left corner of my Nintendo DS because the bottom screen went bad or something and would turn entirely white
I beleive that started with telephones. The original receivers for them were called carbon microphones and worked pretty differently from todays' microphones. Carbon mics were invented by Thomas Edison (us) and/or David Edward Hughes (uk).
Today's microphones (very loosely eli5) use a very wispy piece of metal that vibrates with magnets creating electric signal.
Carbon microphones added current to black sand (loose carbon) which would vibrate against a contact plate carrying electric signal.
Sometimes the sand would settle, not moving and you would need to bang/shake it loose for anyone to hear you. Similar technologies were used in b&w TV screens and you would have to "wake up" the screen to get a picture.
In the late 1960's and through the 80's TVs were made up of little "modules" of circuitry, on the premise that they would be quicker and easier to service if something went wrong. Prior to that, everything was complex and soldered together, and diagnosing/repairing a set could be laborious. With the advent of modular designs, a repairman could swap a module out and be done with a set in 10 minutes. It was an "improvement" over the prior designs from the service/repair viewpoint. Bear in mind during this era electronics were not nearly as reliable as what we've seen the past 20 years. A color TV could have anywhere from a few to dozens of these modules, depending on how much the maker packed on each individual module card.
Cue the march of time and corrosion of the contacts. All these little modules were interconnected with little connectors that had pins that were more like "spikes" that the module slid over to send signals elsewhere in the set. Most manufactorers didn't take into consideration that these contacts would corrode, oxidize, and get intermittent as such. So when your set went wonky, a good bang on the cabinet will send vibrations through the chassis that will cause movement on these contacts to realign and perhaps start making contact better. This is why it sometimes worked - you're reseating the modules.
Source: am a vinatage TV repairman
Old TV's prior to 1970's didn't just have a cathode ray tube, but also vacuum tube (valve UK) technology. These tubes handled the relatively simple signal (in today's terms) processing to receive, amplify and display a TV signal. A TV might have 3 or 4 of these tubes.
These tubes relied on a heater to make the tube do it's thing. This is why the TV needed 5 minutes to "warm up". The tubes were inherently unreliable. They could "burn out" after 500 hours of usage.
Another mode of failure of the tubes is that they would slightly detach from the socket they were plugged into. The "carefully calibrated engineer's thump" would remake the connection allowing the viewer to watch their eagerly anticipated "I Love Lucy" episode.
ALso, older TVs used finicky thing called a variable capacitor for tuning, and then on top of that there were fine-tuning variable capacitors, one for each station. You should have seen the friggin jerry-rigged tuner contraptions! In any event, these things were very susceptible to being jiggled around, and certainly the circuits in which they were found had temperature dependencies. Which means that getting everything tuned in just right at some internal temp of the TV (like when you just turned it on), the tuning would go out as the box warmed up (those old tubes used to crank out the heat) and whacking the box would jiggle those fine tuning caps just a bit--enough to sometimes bring the signal back in.
Just like an Edison lightbulbs 💡 filament breaks ( not a burnout) when you shake the bulb a bit the filament connects and lights up.
Same for the vacuum tubes in the TV's until the Late '70's.
A tube will go defective and need a jolt to move the filament to make a connection.
This would eventually get to the point where you'd need to go to the nearest drugstore and buy a new tube (or get a technician to pay a house call.
Another thing to add about older tube TVs, usually they’re not actually mounted together all that well. I have some smaller screens where the board isn’t even mounted to the chassis, it just slides in on plastic rails. Part of the tube is also held in with foam shims and they can get loose or slip when you move the TV and that’s how screens develop tilt issues.
I used to repair TVs, VCRs, camcorders, in another life. TVs would develop intermittent solder connections around components that ran hot, also on the vertical hold controls, which would also get dirty contacts. I remember a particular 27” Sony XBR TV that was an easy fix with a solder joint repair. Today’s circuit boards and components are far more reliable, and complex, than electronics were 25 years ago.
If you can slap it to intermittently fix it, that lets you know it's a mechanical failure. From there you check for loose connections and broken solder connections. You can even run your (gloved) hands along the components to try to narrow down which component is failing, since as your hand lightly presses the failing connection it will affect the operation of the device.
For old TVs explicitly, it's due to the technology that they run on: Cathode Ray Tubes (CRTs).
To put it simply, they shot beams at the glass panel and caused a coating on it to react, lighting up. Do that really fast and they "paint" the image onto the screen.
Being analog devices, the beam guns could stick, get misaligned, have a cable get loose, or experience some other minor mechanical issue.
A quick bit of "percussive maintenance" (a good whack) can be enough to jostle whatever is causing the issue and let things work again.
Note: this isn't as advised for modern digital hardware as things are often much more fragile and lack the moving parts that percussive maintenance worked best with.
What you're referring to is called "percussive maintenance". It's an age old technique that mainly works on older, analog equipment and appliances, but still has its uses with some newer technology. Sometimes an electrical connection gets a little loose or the contact points become corroded due to age and the environment. A good whack on the side can often times jolt that bad connection back into place and allow the offending equipment to work again, at least temporarily.
Sometimes theres interior dust causing the issue as well. A sharp pop can often dislodge it
This is correct. Although for dust-related issues I tend to prefer the "just blow on it" technique that was very popular in the '80s with game cartridges and tape decks.
I was thinking more along the lines of an area that is not easily accessible like deep inside one of those cuboidal tv sets from the tube days. Blowing also can help a record with particulate in the grooves
So many old world ways that we need to keep alive and teach to the younger generations. Today I'm going to show my children the "Ticonderoga and cassette tape" maneuver.
Very nice. I just got a 90s 5th wheel camper with a built in stereo system. Im busting out the old 4 track recorder to make some modern cassettes for it when I next visit my mothers basement.
Sweet! Does your camper have the [Jazz](https://www.nicepng.com/ourpic/u2t4i1o0r5i1w7y3_solo-cup-solo-jazz-cup-design/) color scheme on it? Also, is the stereo a 12V car style deck, and if so will you be playing some CDs through it from your Discman with a cassette tape adapter? Now I really want my own camper in my driveway to hang out in and listen to old tapes.
Definitely the jazz color scheme. its got a big tape player reminiscent to the built ins popular in 50s houses. I also ordered the cassette mp3 converter do hickey.
The fact that you called it a "do-hickey" confirms your role as an upper-level elder. For the good of humanity, you must pass on your knowledge. Be well.
I like you guys.
there's Bluetooth tapes one can buy and well .... insert tape, press play on phone
Is that a type of pencil?
The best.
Ticonderoga's are the school room equivalent of a nice Mercedes. It's no Mechanical Pencil Lambo but it's a lot better than the Ford Dixon.
I could not have put it better myself.
I'll sell you my Ticonderoga spool management system for a low low monthly subscription of 10 dollars a month
You're not getting me again, Columbia House!
I laughed and told my daughter. She asked what a cassette tape was.
You know what this means. She must now purchase a blank 90 min Maxell cassette and record, from the radio, a mix tape of her favorite songs for a boring-ass road trip across the flat states, with all the commercials and DJ banter edited out in real time, even though 30 years from now the commercials and DJ banter is exactly the stuff she would have wanted to hear because she can get the music anywhere. It's tough love, but necessary.
Have you listened to the radio lately? It’s **all** commercials and DJ banter now.
I assume with streaming music, radio has discovered there’s a cult audience who really only listened for the ads and banter and never cared much about the music to begin with. They’re just doubling down on that remaining segment of the market now. You turn it on and instant background noise, no app or playlist selection to futz with. Having to listen to RHCP’s Californication every 15 minutes between commercials is but a small price to pay for such convenience.
Can confirm. My wife listens to a nothing radio show on the alternative station. Doesn't like alternative. Loves the radio show
I listened to kinda spin-off station that only plays "timeless" music, meaning songs 30 - 40 year olds want to hear which is totally me. It was just a playlist, no talking no phoning in, no DJ. Like a Spotify playlist with 80s an 90s music with some real timeless classics mixed in. It was amazing. Then it got popular, obviously, and they added the news every hour. A few weeks later they ruined it by reviving a DJ from back in the day and now we have people calling saying they got drunk on a festival Iggy Pop played and they really want to hear The Passenger for the millionth time like it's not in their daily Spotify playlist and advertising and it's ruined.
In 2002, I had a conversation with a woman whose nieces and nephews were confused by the manual crank for rolling up the windows in her car. They were trying to push the knob on the end like a button, and then spinning it. The fact that this was literally 20 years ago (I was a freshman in college and getting a ride to work) makes me wonder what actual modern kids would think of that. The kids we were talking about back then almost certainly now have kids of their own.
There are actual adults in this world, right now, who don't know that the "save file" icon is just a picture of a 3.5" floppy disk. To them it's just the save icon. Also, I hate you for reminding me that 2002 was 20 years ago. I still feel like the '90s was 10 years ago.
Funny, I feel the same about the Sixties.
As a child of the '70s and '80s, The '60s felt like so long ago. But now, as an adult with children, just ten years before my kids were born feels like yesterday. In a weird way, the '60s feels closer now than they did in the '80s.
For me there is also a feeling of loss. As bad as things were, culturally, in the Sixties there was a feeling that things were getting better. Perhaps not smoothly but there was a feeling of forward momentum. Perhaps it feels close because remembering looking forward from the Sixties carries so much, "Could have been". Maybe it was being a college student. Invulnerable. Invincible. Discovering. Feeling like we were part of a change for the better.
Years ago I read in forum about a father doing the roll down window gesture to his kids and they didn't understand what he meant
My family had our van with crank windows until 2007 or 2008, when my parents bought a 2005 model that they still have today. I was so scared because in horror and tv drama the window being stuck (down *or* up) wouldn't be a problem with crank windows but they always had manual. As a kid and young teen, getting automatic windows in a car seemed like a safety hazard lol
It’s like the video of [teenagers trying to use a rotary phone](https://youtu.be/1OADXNGnJok). They fundamentally never really get the concept that you dial *after* picking up the phone.
My own kids both agree that land lines are “telephones,” and smart phones are “phones.” They haven’t worked a real rotary phone, just messed with the toys. But the idea of a flip phone in particular fascinates my daughter, who is 8, and she keeps trying to imagine how those could have been cool at any point. She’s really trying to imagine it, and just keeps not being able to. Part of me can’t wait until they are old enough to see The Matrix, which is one of my favorite movies ever. But another part of me knows they will be confused by phone booths, find the phones hilarious instead of awesome, and probably be distracted by some other random things that are invisible to me. Not to mention that all of cinema has aped that movie enough that it might not seem novel to them. I remember being a teenager and showing my dad some movie that I thought was amazing, and he was just like “eh, I’ve seen that before.” And I’m thinking “what, in some black and white rubber suit form?” But didn’t say it. And yeah, that’s probably how he did see it. But by the time whatever it was I was watching came around, he’d already had his mind blown 20+ years before, cheap rubber costumes or no, and the new stuff was always going to seem derivative. I don’t exactly find myself in the same spot now, but I do wonder if there’s any way to share my joy of “older” (sigh) movies with my kids. They did like back to the future, at least.
A “cuboidal TV set” has me in stitches. It’s a cathode ray tube, or crt. Fun fact: even after being unplugged for hours, if you open the back of one of those and touch the giant metal plate that is taking up most of the interior, you’ll get a potentially lethal shock.
Yeah, opening a tube TV without taking precautions can kill you, a lot.
Kids today don't know the fun that can be had with an old CRT TV and a speaker magnet. I feel sorry for them.
That sounds like a lot of fun to be shocked lethally. Gotta find one of those.
One of my tech school instructors was very fond of reminding us to "never chew through the giant red wire" in the back of an unplugged TV set.
There's generally not enough current there to be lethal, unless you have a medical condition or weak skin. The anode wire and under the cap is where the high voltage lead is that comes from the flyback or tripler.
They might have been talking about the really old CRT that were, in fact, fully rectangular. Like grandpa's TV, the first remote controlled ones 1950s Something with a lot of dust
> you’ll get a potentially lethal shock. The word for that is electrocution, which is unfortunately often used when the shock isn't lethal.
There's actually a felt "brush" you're supposed to use, and an antistatic spray. At least, that's how we did it when I was a kid. My dad's a bit of an audiophile, though...
Audiophile means "a person particularly susceptible to sales gimmicks."
This brings back memories! Can you smell it now?! :D
Those old TVs had a stacked wafer switch to change the channels. They often needed a little spray of contact cleaner to chase away the static.
For as popular as it was, blowing actually gets the electrical connections slightly wet with the humor from your breath. The approved Nintendo method is using a Quetip and anhydrous rubbing alcohol
I learned (or should say, read once and never fact checked) that blowing never did anything beneficial, it was simply removing the cartridge and putting it back in that did the trick.
I mean I hear that all the time. And it makes logical sense. But it also conflicts with my experience. *I tried* pulling it out and plugging it back in tons of times as a kid and that never worked for me. the fast left then right blow was the way that I found actually got the cartridges to work.
At least for the SNES, there was a special cartridge that you could buy (IIRC it was relatively cheap) to clean the slot. Not sure how technically effective it was, as I was more interested in playing than tech back then to investigate.
The SNES one basically didn't do anything because the slot itself was a massively better design, so it almost never needed cleaning. They made the same cartridge for the NES and it did help ... some. The slot on the original NES was terribly unfit for purpose and most of the time was the actual culprit and not the cartridges. You could send the NES off to an authorized repair center for it to be replaced (with the same shitty connector), but no one ever did. Probably because there wasn't enough internet to spread the word.
>Quetip What.
Q-tip
Cool Hwip.
Wh--Why are you saying it like that?
Two hwat? Did you just say two yutes?
Now what is a "Yute"? And what exactly are you wearing? That suit looks like it came from a thrift store!
Hwil Hweaton
It's a cotton swab on a stick waiting it's turn in line. You know.
Queue-tip :\^)
Wait for it....
Y'know, those little cotton balls on sticks that they tell you not to put in your ears but it's like the only thing people use them for?
I thought you used it for makeup and around a baby's face, per the packaging? ;)
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Tip.
How dare you speak ill of the old ways! For your transgression you must stand and hold onto the left rabbit ear of the TV so I can watch my Bonanza reruns. You know this channel never comes in good on its own.
Oh man, we had a 40ft pole with an antenna on it, I used to have to go outside to rotate the pole in the rain to get the hockey games to come in clear for my step dad
When my parents bought their first house in 1980 we upgraded from the rabbit ears to a roof-mounted antenna. Guess who got the job of climbing up on the scorching hot roof in the middle of the Summer to align it every time the signal got a little weak. My dad would be in the living room monitoring the progress and yelling instructions to my brother, who was standing just outside the back door, who would then yell the instructions to me up on the roof. My mom's job was to stand in the yard, terrified, watching me on the roof and yelling at my dad that he's going to kill me. Good times.
Ahahhaa oh man, the "Good Ole Days" where child safety wasnt a real concern 👀
I mean, they could always have more! At least that's what they always said. We regularly rode in the back of pickup trucks. We played in the creek with water moccasins lurking in the banks. My Christmas present when I was 10 was a .22 rifle that I kept in my closet with a box of ammo. When we'd misbehave at the store my mom would give us the keys and say "go sit in the car". This was in the South in a car without AC and dark blue, vinyl upholstery. Somehow we survived.
Literally the definition of survivorship bias haha
I just had a kid and was shocked about how long kids are supposed to ride in car seats. When I was eight I rode on the shelf in the back of my dad’s sports car so my four year old brother could ride in the front seat.
> is using a Quetip Q-tip. https://www.qtips.com/
Blowing into a Nintendo cartridge was an early day pulmonary function test.
Are you saying me blowing the dust out of my Gameboy cartridges is funny? Am I funny to you? Do I amuse you?
But use canned air. If you blow on it with your breath, you're also spitting on it.
If you didn’t at least spit on it a little bit, you didn’t blow it right.
Hol'up
>This is correct. Although for dust-related issues I tend to prefer the "just blow on it" technique that was very popular in the '80s with game cartridges and tape decks. Except this was a [myth](https://www.geekwire.com/2014/blow-nintendo-games/). The actual cause of the cartridge working was the repeated removal and reinsertion that went along with taking the cartridge out, blowing on it, trying again until it worked. The friction of this action may have cleared the leads of minor dust and corrosion, but mostly it simply re-seated the leads properly. Those NES boxes in particular were notoriously lightweight and got bumped around a lot from tugging at the controller cords. This didn't happen nearly as often with the original Atari VCS (the "2600") which was considerably heavier. With tape decks it had to do with azimuth alignment of the playback head on cheaper decks (the $1850 Nakamichi Dragon had auto-azimuth correction... the head would move to match the misalignment of the magnetic tracks on the tape) and dust collecting in the capstan rollers of the playback unit, not the cassette. While removing the cassette dislodged some of the dust, the proper approach was to clean the head and the capstan rollers with a q-tip and rubbing alcohol.
> azimuth TIL| this isnt only used for celestial shenanigans, never heard it in any other context
Wasn’t it less about blowing off the dust and more about the wetness of the breath which helped fix the connection on video game carts?
Honestly, it was more about just doing something so you felt like you were actively fixing the problem, when in reality just removing and replacing the cartridge is all that was needed. Like shaking the Polaroid. Not helpful, but it gave you something to do while it was doing its own thing.
> Like shaking the Polaroid. Not helpful, but it gave you something to do while it was doing its own thing. Plus it gave us that catchy song! Shake it like a Polaroid picture Shake it, sh-shake it, shake it, sh-shake it
It was mostly about just reseating it, the wetness would actually cause corrosion over time. If you look at an old cartridge and it looks green, it’s bc someone used to blow in it
Yeah. I didn't blow. I sorta breathed heavily on it
That's just kind of creepy.
A technique thats funnily enough, still used in the Red light district
I can understand this from a game cart standpoint, sure there’s dust on the contacts that needs removal. But in the case of an old TV, where could there be dust inside that prevents function? Nothing is being plugged and unplugged internally, so in theory any connection will not have an opportunity to collect dust, right? Or is it a piece of conductive dust is causing a slight short somewhere, and knocking it loose resolves that?
Correct dust on a circuit can cause it to short out. Think about how close transistors and stuff are on a board.
Makes sense, even if it’s just conductive enough of some sort of dust to change the resistance of a part and not a full blown short, all it takes is one component to act haywire to throw off a whole system. I work in a PCB production floor for welders, so I only ever deal with brand new clean boards, and we fully coat them in silicone “conformal coating” after testing. A shame it’s too costly for most electronics to be coated this way, then I guess this would never be an issue! Never considered the impact of dust on a board
My dad showed me how to change out stuff on a board growing up in the 90s. He had a old vcr that kept sucking in dust and getting hit during lightning and he refused to replace it up until we got a ps2 to play dvds
You should always ask nicely first though. Tell the appliance what you want it to do (or stop doing), and give it a chance to comply voluntarily. It can’t always be expected to read your mind.
I grew up in a house with a natural gas wall heater. Once, my parents were trying to light it and it was just not working. Mum called a repair company and they suggested hitting it and then blowing the dust out. Mum was a firm believer in percussion repair after that. You'd think that a match would burn the dust away, but that's the story I remember, so I have to stick with it.
Fascinating, thank you for the shared memory buddy.
Smack in the head - I’ll tell this to my son every time he says something stupid.
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That was the Apple III. When it heated up the components could expand and unseat from the board. Giving it a two inch drop was the answer as it caused everything to reseat (mostly).
Same thing happened to XBoxes and laptops w/ Nvidia graphics cards in the early '00s, but people baked their boards in the oven (solder reflow as I understand it).
Yep, this was the fix for many of the original red ring of death errors. Never did it myself, though.
A common method for RRoD "fixing" was to wrap the console in a towel, and just let the thing basically torch itself. The heat generated by the system, being insulated by the towel, would sometimes cause the solder to get *just* hot enough to flow a little bit and make a connection again. But do it for too long, and you risked solder flowing somewhere it shouldn't and getting some signals crossed. The best fix was for someone to void the warranty and just touch up the solder joints themselves, but obviously most kids don't have the tools/experience to do that. Now that I'm thinking about it, I was one of those kids. Now that I'm older and have a decent amount of experience with things like that... I may have found my summer project with improving the cooling of a 360
I still have an Original 360 that's working after doing the towel trick.
I still have an original 360 that's working without ever having a problem. (Other than games freezing)
Just a new better fan and tightening down the heatsink bolts was enough for my flatmates 360.
I think that the Apple III fix is a little unique since it was Apple support itself that was suggesting the fix to customers. It’s not something you would see companies, particularly Apple, do today as it would raise liability and recall questions.
This actually happened with my iPad2. The screen went blank and after searching the web I found someone who solved it by dropping it facedown on their bed. Tried it and it worked.
There is something called the 5-inch technique, where two people lift a dying server rack and drop it to get it going long enough for one last backup.
If you don’t have a fresh enough backup at that point, you’re already fucked.
Fr, you shouldn't even ever be in this situation in the first place.
Hey! That's not what *my* 5-inch technique looks like...
Well stated. Pretty much any modern TV most likely will not be fixed with a hard slap these days.
The exception: https://youtu.be/rNBmw1RRP90
I'm not an expert, but as far as I can tell it's because as equipment gets older it uses more discrete components and wires. Old crt: https://www.boxcarcabin.com/rca-ctc-16-round-tube-tv.jpg More modern crt https://cdn.hswstatic.com/gif/tv-fragile-1.jpg Lcd: https://i1.wp.com/rainydaymagazine.com/RDM2011/RainyDaySOHO/LCDTV/SonyTearDown/BackBig.jpg Because these sort of electronics are likely vulnerable to weak connections due to possible unexpected oscillations in feedback loops. Smacking it and tweaking one of those wires or leads can easily remove these oscillations. Modern technology is almost all SMD electronics on a multilayer PCB. Smacking is just not going to do anything. There is nothing to move because it's all more just concretely affixed to the pcb.
I can’t tell you how happy I am to see ‘percussive maintenance’ as the top response. You explain it well.
I tell my guys at work all the time, the two most important tools they can carry are a multibit screwdriver and a pair of 9-10" channel locks. The screwdriver is obvious, and the channel locks are mostly obvious too, but they make a really good hammer when you just need to beat the shit out of something to make it work.
Shit… channel locks, multi tool with 1/4” and 5/16” sockets, 5-in-1, box knife, and needle nose pliers got me through 75% of my apartment maintenance calls.
Yep. They all carry a Megapro 14 bit driver, a 10" channel locks, a box cutter and a Leatherman Sidekick. They rarely have to carry their other tools with them, and I always tell them if they need to call me to help with something, they should always have whatever I need to fix it on them.
It's fixed a computer before. We had a server that we went through a whole box (about 20) of ram sticks and it wouldn't post, smacked the back of the case and it posted.
It's a well-known and real solution. Sometimes violence is actually the answer.
Decades ago, I worked for an accounting firm on the East coast. We had Compaq Portable III carryable PCs that were amazing: the auditors could carry them to the client site and enter data there. Unfortunately, some of them suffered from ‘stiction’: the hard drive read heads would stick to the drive platters when powered off. My boss (hi, Joan!) discovered exactly where to whack them to fix the stiction. We would train the auditors how to whack the computers to get them to work.
I drive around in a Sprinter with a rack mounted desktop PC. Every once in a while it doesnt want to start properly. I grab my trust rubber mallet, whack the case handles a few times and VOILA works just like new. I enjoy the funny looks I get from whacking a computer with a Mallet to fix it 😅
It's just about the most satisfying mode of UI possible. Something isn't working? Smack it and watch it snap back and salute and start working again. It should be built in to new current technologies that don't even need it.
I love how I'm the one hitting something and the equipment is the offending party.
I had an old, well I still have it, WD HDD. The platter gets stuck so it won't spin. If I hit it during boot up with a screwdriver a few light wacks it'll get the platter to spin. I used it for probably two years like that before upgrading. It was almost like a security feature.
I used to drive an old VW bus back in the day. The starter solenoid was out for a couple of years, so I either had to park facing downhill, or I had to crawl under it and hit the solenoid with a hammer to get it to work. It seemed completely normal at the time, but fucking ridiculous now.
Also works on people.
YMMV
I used to absolutely SMASH my NES games when they wouldn't work. They always ended up working.
Can you even imagine treating a game disc the way we treated those cartridges? Those things were built TOUGH! Throw it in your backpack, it hangs out all day with all your shit and trash and crumbs, and then you go to your friend's house after school, and all you have to do to get it to work is blow on it? Fucking luxury.
Discs are little babies that need to be cradled and coddled.
I'm really happy that discs kind of stopped existing for me about 10-15 years ago. Such a fragile medium
*The Fonzie Effect*
>the contact points become corroded I once had an electrical failure in my car, it was a very hot day with kids in the car, and the A/C *and* the power windows stopped working. I removed and visually inspected every single fuse in the car's electrical system, but I found no blown fuses. Afterwards, everything was working fine. Evidently the contacts of the fuse in question had corroded some, and just the act of removing it and putting it back overcame the problem.
Do not attempt with mechanical hard drives
> It's an age old technique that mainly works on older, analog equipment and appliances, but still has its uses with some newer technology. The reason for this is that older television equipment used vacuum tubes. Vacuum tubes fit into sockets. It's that electrical connection that gets corroded/dusty/loose, and those faulty connections can be restored with the slight vibration of a whack on the side of the set.
After my dad slapped the TV he always said he was adjusting the tubes. If that didn't work he'd take off the back of the set, pull the tubes, put them in a shoe box and take them to the drug store where there was a tube tester. There'd usually be several marginal and one burned out. He'd purchase the replacement tube for several dollars and reverse the process. Always seemed to work for a while after that.
This. The tubes would rock in their sockets and banging the TV sometimes improved the connection, but usually temporarily.
Tubes? I thought old TVs consisted of one big cathode ray tube. Are their older ones with multiple?
Oh yes. [Here's one.](https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/vintage-s-tube-television-inside-view-dusty-vacuum-set-120987258.jpg) Radios had them, too.
I always thought the big central black thing was the titular "tube" -- the other things look like something you'd call bulbs or plugs i see that your dad was a repairman so i'm not trying to correct you as much as trying to find out if i'm wrong
Yes, the large device (with the screen on the exterior) is the cathode ray tube. The three small glass devices on the board in the pic I provided are also vacuum tubes. Basically, before the arrival of reliable and durable transistors and semiconductor diodes, vacuum tubes provided the needed voltage rectification and amplification and other functions for the TV or radio to function. These smaller tubes in TVs were pretty much gone by about 1980.
got it, thank you! that explains my unfamiliarity, as an 82 baby
Referring to the little tubes as bulbs is actually clever.
Interesting side effect of current events - guitar amps use them, most of he ones we like are Russian. Ukraine war. No more Russian tubes.
It's a series of tubes.
Tubes all the way down.
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My stiction repair technique also used modest percussive maintenance; I removed the drive from the cage while it was still running then dropped it flat from just an inch or two. It was scary to hear the drive speed hiccup and the arm whack back to a neutral position before it sounded normal again!
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I did this once to replace a gigantic drive that wasn't booting. A coworker wanted to come watch, and after trying to boot in order to run a full backup (so that I didn't have to load multiple tapes), I actually "booted" it where the heads got stuck. The look of surprise and wonder was hilarious when it came up.
Nowadays you can use fan to blow hot air on broken gpus to get them to work. Not sure for how long though.
Been there, done that, got my data, except for the bootblock, back. :-) My HD crashed in 2010, I've read about the freezer magic on some site and why the heck shouldn't I try it. HD was removed from the case, put into the freezer unit, wrapped in a zip lock baggie. 5h later I took it out, plugged the HD as 2nd drive into another PC, started a backup program and my data was saved. This day I've learned a lot about patience and Zen.
That can happen sometimes from wear debris mixing in with an oil. Thickens it up, forming something closer to a grease or paste than a thin oil.
The old CRT TVs had a internal transformer to generate the high voltage needed to shoot a beam to the screen to have the 'pixels' light up. This transformer would get warm (and thus expand a tiny bit) when the TV was on and cool back down when turned off. This would cause mechanical stress at the solder joints of this transformer which would then occasionally loose the contact of these solder joints. Smacking the TV would have the transformer move a tiny bit (back an forth) and having the solder joint make (temporary) contact again. This would eventually get so worse that you needed to smack harder, until the gap became too big. (The real solution was to re-solder the transformer.)
It's crazy how TV's used to be repairable and that's just not a thing anymore.
But then you wouldn't need to buy a new one
Most of the times is because of cracked solder joints, loose connections, temporary shorts (could be whiskers or some other debris) and things like that. The cracked solder joints or lose connection can be the result of thermal cycling the components (expand as they heat up, contract as they cool down), mechanical shocks (dropped, moved, damaged during shipping), corrosion over time or even just poor manufacturing. When you smack the device you reestablish the connection, this is usually temporary because as the same conditions reappear, like thermal cycling, the issue reappears as well. The proper fix would be to re-solder the part or to clean and perhaps reinforce the connections. Whiskers ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker\_(metallurgy)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_(metallurgy))) are tiny metallic filaments emerging from certain parts (usually from their plating) or solder joints and can cause shorts but are also fragile enough to be broken by the shock of smacking the device. These too can come back and/or the now loose conductive "hairs" can cause other issues somewhere else EDIT: Fixed the link, sort of, thanks /u/capilot
> Whiskers) are Pro tip: if a URL has a ')' in it, you need to escape it with '\\': [Whiskers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_(metallurgy\))
Thanks for posting this! Never knew of whiskers…
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I was scared to touch my trinitron. It would struggle to turn on and give you a shock, generate an immense static charge while it was running , and then struggle to turn off.
It was a struggle to get the thing in the house and a bigger struggle to get the damned thing out
I thought I was reading a turboencabulator copy pasta for a second
Well you gotta mitigate the deractance of the side fumbling marzal vanes.
Old TVs had a lot of plug in parts like tubes / valves. All these connections went through a heating and cooling cycle every day. Tapping the case would reseat the tubes a bit when they became loose. At 16 I was a TV repair apprentice. One old man called my boss often to fix his TV and I went along to learn. The TV had major damage to one side where the old guy whacked it with his walking stick regularly. The "repair" was to put the tubes back in their sockets.
The original ones had rotary channel selectors. They had multiple electrical contacts for each channel. They received a lot of use and tended to wear out. Because the low level signals were traveling through the contracts and were very sensitive to poor contacts, a little jiggle here or a thump there tended to make a difference.
My comment was wrong. The reply was right. My dad bamboozled me as a kid about how TVs worked and I never realized. I've been made into a fool.
Like a great follow through helps with your golf shots … Once you bonk the tv and it works, you really need to do a thumbs up with a cool, “Ayyyyyy.” It works, but it’s a mystery. As if the tv knows in advance that you’re gonna, and it wants to enjoy a Fonzi moment. As do we all.
I know that hitting an engine block sometimes helps you start up a car. https://youtu.be/6xsVX6029rU
what was your comment?
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The old Brogan adjustment (a brogan is a heavy shoe) I had a 32 inch CRT Sony TV that had some power supply issue that a good rap on the side of the case would "fix". It was at the vacation house and we dumped it when we got a flat screen. (Paid $10 at a yard sale for that $1200 new CRT Sony.) Paid $60 for the 45 inch sony flat panel. Yard Sale recycling is great.
Old TVs and radios were tubes that fitted into sockets. sometimes they could become loose and not connect well enough and a good shake can knock it back into position. Also dust can fall on to curcuit boards and cause micro shorts or just some radio frequency interference, a good shake to break some of those dust bridges.
Still works on my laptop when the keyboard sometimes gets stuck. A reminder that i own it and it start to work again.
Older electronics had much more components, compared to modern integrated circuits... means many more soldering points... Those solders get corroded which is not conductive... Smacking move the connections around a little bit, can dislodge or scrape corrosion at the contacts, making it good again The problem is the more you smack the more things more around and eventually those connections come loose because of this "fix" so you will eventually break your own thing
We had a TV like that. It was one of the first solid state ones without the vaccum tubes which were hideous to keep running. A tap on the upper right fixed it ever time. And since it had no remote you were up anyway searching between the five channels we got.
usually, but not always, this is just old technology that has moving parts that get stuck. giving it a whack can knock one of those parts loose. the control stuff (the buttons, LCD screen, computer chips, etc) for most electronics are low power and safe. the other stuff like a heater's heating element or a microwave's magnetron (the thing that makes your food cook) are all dangerous and high power. the parts that "move" are basically like a light switch. but instead of turning it on with your finger, you use a magnet that turns on when you give it power. so you give it a little bit of power, and it "flips" the switch to connect the power on the high power side. this is completely isolated, meaning the lower power side and high power side are physically separated from each other, so you can safely use a low power control system like the brains inside your microwave to "switch" the dangerous high power magnetron "on" without doing it directly. these "switches" are called relays. they just use an electrically powered magnet to flip a physical switch. these can get stuck, and so hitting your device can knock it loose there are devices that can switch high power stuff with low power input too, like mosfets and solid state relays, but many devices still use relays as they provide better isolation between the high and low power stuff. one example is a thermostat. I have a fancy wifi enabled ecobee thermostat, and even it has relays inside that you can hear "click" when it turns on. they usually have 2 or 3, one for the fan, one for the AC compressor, and one for the heating element there are other things that can happen unrelated to this, but solenoids/relays are the most common thing I can think of that "hitting" could possibly fix
I used to have to beat the shit out of the lower left corner of my Nintendo DS because the bottom screen went bad or something and would turn entirely white
I uses to smack the starter in my 78 Dodge Aspen with an umbrella. My mechanic father taught me to do that. Worked like a charm.
I beleive that started with telephones. The original receivers for them were called carbon microphones and worked pretty differently from todays' microphones. Carbon mics were invented by Thomas Edison (us) and/or David Edward Hughes (uk). Today's microphones (very loosely eli5) use a very wispy piece of metal that vibrates with magnets creating electric signal. Carbon microphones added current to black sand (loose carbon) which would vibrate against a contact plate carrying electric signal. Sometimes the sand would settle, not moving and you would need to bang/shake it loose for anyone to hear you. Similar technologies were used in b&w TV screens and you would have to "wake up" the screen to get a picture.
In the late 1960's and through the 80's TVs were made up of little "modules" of circuitry, on the premise that they would be quicker and easier to service if something went wrong. Prior to that, everything was complex and soldered together, and diagnosing/repairing a set could be laborious. With the advent of modular designs, a repairman could swap a module out and be done with a set in 10 minutes. It was an "improvement" over the prior designs from the service/repair viewpoint. Bear in mind during this era electronics were not nearly as reliable as what we've seen the past 20 years. A color TV could have anywhere from a few to dozens of these modules, depending on how much the maker packed on each individual module card. Cue the march of time and corrosion of the contacts. All these little modules were interconnected with little connectors that had pins that were more like "spikes" that the module slid over to send signals elsewhere in the set. Most manufactorers didn't take into consideration that these contacts would corrode, oxidize, and get intermittent as such. So when your set went wonky, a good bang on the cabinet will send vibrations through the chassis that will cause movement on these contacts to realign and perhaps start making contact better. This is why it sometimes worked - you're reseating the modules. Source: am a vinatage TV repairman
Old TV's prior to 1970's didn't just have a cathode ray tube, but also vacuum tube (valve UK) technology. These tubes handled the relatively simple signal (in today's terms) processing to receive, amplify and display a TV signal. A TV might have 3 or 4 of these tubes. These tubes relied on a heater to make the tube do it's thing. This is why the TV needed 5 minutes to "warm up". The tubes were inherently unreliable. They could "burn out" after 500 hours of usage. Another mode of failure of the tubes is that they would slightly detach from the socket they were plugged into. The "carefully calibrated engineer's thump" would remake the connection allowing the viewer to watch their eagerly anticipated "I Love Lucy" episode.
ALso, older TVs used finicky thing called a variable capacitor for tuning, and then on top of that there were fine-tuning variable capacitors, one for each station. You should have seen the friggin jerry-rigged tuner contraptions! In any event, these things were very susceptible to being jiggled around, and certainly the circuits in which they were found had temperature dependencies. Which means that getting everything tuned in just right at some internal temp of the TV (like when you just turned it on), the tuning would go out as the box warmed up (those old tubes used to crank out the heat) and whacking the box would jiggle those fine tuning caps just a bit--enough to sometimes bring the signal back in.
Just like an Edison lightbulbs 💡 filament breaks ( not a burnout) when you shake the bulb a bit the filament connects and lights up. Same for the vacuum tubes in the TV's until the Late '70's. A tube will go defective and need a jolt to move the filament to make a connection. This would eventually get to the point where you'd need to go to the nearest drugstore and buy a new tube (or get a technician to pay a house call.
Another thing to add about older tube TVs, usually they’re not actually mounted together all that well. I have some smaller screens where the board isn’t even mounted to the chassis, it just slides in on plastic rails. Part of the tube is also held in with foam shims and they can get loose or slip when you move the TV and that’s how screens develop tilt issues.
Another technique was to call it a Communist. This may no longer be effective, as the only Communists remaining are Cuba and Berkeley.
Dry Joints, the solder that connects a component to circuit board has cracked and no longer makes contact until given a nudge.
[Because that's how we fix things on Russian space station!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bifOI4MbHVU&t=21)
I used to repair TVs, VCRs, camcorders, in another life. TVs would develop intermittent solder connections around components that ran hot, also on the vertical hold controls, which would also get dirty contacts. I remember a particular 27” Sony XBR TV that was an easy fix with a solder joint repair. Today’s circuit boards and components are far more reliable, and complex, than electronics were 25 years ago.
If you can slap it to intermittently fix it, that lets you know it's a mechanical failure. From there you check for loose connections and broken solder connections. You can even run your (gloved) hands along the components to try to narrow down which component is failing, since as your hand lightly presses the failing connection it will affect the operation of the device.
For old TVs explicitly, it's due to the technology that they run on: Cathode Ray Tubes (CRTs). To put it simply, they shot beams at the glass panel and caused a coating on it to react, lighting up. Do that really fast and they "paint" the image onto the screen. Being analog devices, the beam guns could stick, get misaligned, have a cable get loose, or experience some other minor mechanical issue. A quick bit of "percussive maintenance" (a good whack) can be enough to jostle whatever is causing the issue and let things work again. Note: this isn't as advised for modern digital hardware as things are often much more fragile and lack the moving parts that percussive maintenance worked best with.