My father was pretty electronics savvy so we used to do our own repairs during the B&W years. In fact, we had a few sets lying around that he was trying to salvage. Whe I went to do my junior high science project I needed a high-voltage power supply. We grabbed one of those and used its supply to provide the voltage.

I remember my wife and my first color set - a large Sanyo, in the late 1980s. It was in the middle of the Toshiba/Kongsberg scandal and I live in a Navy town so I boycotted Toshiba for years. The tuner chip in the set began to fail with a heat-related failure. It would blink (loose lock on the channel) once for a few milliseconds and then be fine. You almost wondered if you had really seen it. Ten minutes later it would blink again and then five minutes later blink again and eventually would build up to being a continuous splutter of blinking. If you cooled it down it started again. I took it to a repair shop who turned it on to test it and nothing happened. A half-hour later they were just about to turn it off and tell me that it was fine when "blat!" it did its thing. They happened to have a few of the chips on hand so they were able to replace it. A few years later the failure started again. When we went back to the shop, the guy told us, "This is my last chip and they don't make them anymore." The next time it failed it was done.

Bob