My dad dumped a Curtis Mathes color TV on me. Too expensive to repair said the tech at the local dealer. Fine. I turned it on. Picture won’t sync. Found the sync board. 9 transistors. Spot checked junctions with my VOM. Found one that didn’t look right. Looked up the substitute in the ECG line of components. $1.50 for the part. Replaced suspect with substitute. Picture syncs correctly. A color TV for $1.50 and 20 minutes to diagnose and repair. It served for another 3 years.
And I think Curtis Mathis was the last tv manufactured in the U.S.
Since this is about home repair, I've got a story to tell.
Almost two weeks ago we had a bad storm and that night a lightening strike hit very close to our house. One circuit breaker tripped in the breaker box. The WiFi was taken out immediately, the hot water tap had red brown rust coming out of it and the water pressure was low. I found two panes of glass broken in the basement and the ring doorbell would not work (WIFI?).
The WIFI was a no-brainer. My VOM showed that I had power on the power cord but no keep-alive led on the router at all. I took the wireless gateway router to Xfinity the next day and got a replacement.
The Ring doorbell was blown-up and I measured the 18 volts getting to the device to prove it. Goodbye Ring doorbell, we never like it anyway.
I decided to just wait to see if the rust in the water heater would settle back to the bottom but the next morning I found that the low pressure was because the old galvanized pipe from the street was making a big puddle in our yard. The water meter at the street was running crazy. The plumber said over sixty year old galvanized pipe is hopeless to repair so they but in PEX for our main entrance and upgraded to meet the current code. As our plumber was just arriving to lay the new pipe, the city water crew showed up in our intersection to repair a ruptured main that had to have been hit by the same lightening strike.
A day or two later I saw some water coming from the water heater, and the next day I saw more water. I've had a water heater fail in the past and flood the basement, so I called the plumber and had it replaced and of course brought it up to code.
Then I happen to think that I have lost my cold water pipe ground since it's plastic main pipe now and a sixty plus year old home here in the South had no grounding rod, so I called the electrician. They just got finished installing a grounding system (dual ground rods to meet code) and a whole house EATON CHSPT2ULTRA Ultimate Surge Protector. Without me even mentioning it the electrician put a ground jumper on my cold and hot water pipes above the water heater.
As soon as we get a dry spell in the next few days, I'll fix my windows myself. None of the other things I wanted to tackle myself and both the plumber and the electrician used new technology such as crimped fittings instead of sweating pipes. I'm out some bucks though.