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September 1969 Electronics World
Table of Contents
Wax nostalgic about and learn from the history of early electronics. See articles
from
Electronics World, published May 1959
- December 1971. All copyrights hereby acknowledged.
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There are not too
many honest-to-goodness electronics repair shops around anymore - those where
the proprietor uses multimeters, oscilloscopes, and signal generators to
troubleshoot and align equipment. In fact, I would guess that most such shops do
most of their business based on customers who find their services as the result
of a Google search. You can find lots of cool videos of technicians
demonstrating (and showing off) their collection of test equipment and solder
rework stations - mostly for fixing vintage audio and video gear. Nowadays the
smartphone screen replacement dude
working from a kiosk in the shopping mall is considered an electronics repairman, which is not to diminish the important service they provide, but
it's just not the same thing as someone who methodically determines that a single
transistor has blown or a transformer winding is shorted. Mac and Barney plied their
trade during the era when electronics were transitioning from large, roomy, hand-wired
chassis to crowded, limited working space printed circuit boards.
Deciding if a piece of electronic equipment should be repaired
or not often involves technician's honesty and technical ability.
By John Frye
As usual, the September weather had turned
hot to welcome the kids back to school. Vacation time was over; new programs were
coming on the air; and people were wanting their summer-weary TV sets put into shape
for the fall season. All day Mac and Barney had been steadily chipping away at the
array of portable sets stacked on the receiving bench; but finally Mac tossed his
test prods on the bench, worked his weary shoulders back and forth a couple of times,
and took his pipe from a shirt pocket. That was Barney's clue to stop work, too,
and to get himself a cold drink from the battered but faithful refrigerator in a
corner of the service shop.
"You know, Mac," he said to his employer as he rotated the frosty bottle between
his palms, "it's getting harder and harder for anyone in our line of work to 'get
away from it all.' Time was when an electronics technician could take his fishing
rod, his .22 rifle, or his hunting dog and head for the open country and give his
mind a complete vacation from all thoughts of tubes or transistors - but no more."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because of some harrowing experiences I've had lately. Last week I was fishing
for bluegills over at Lake Schaeffer and not doing too hot, but the joker next to
me kept moving around a few yards at a time and dragging in the fish with disgusting
frequency. I finally broke down and asked what bait he was using and found he was
using catalpa worms just as I was; but he was also using a little green box that
turned out to be one of those sonar fish finders. That was why he was moving every
few minutes; he was simply staying with the school of bluegills.
"The weekend before I went crow-hunting. I noticed the crows seemed to like the
woods across the field from where I was, and I could hear a regular crow caucus
going on over there. Imagine my disgust when I sneaked over and found another hunter
using what he termed 'an electronic game caller.' It was actually a transistorized
45 rpm phonograph with a husky amplifier working into a 25-watt speaker. The
whole thing weighed nine pounds. He was using a crow-calling record, of course,
but he told me the manufacturer also sold records for calling fox, coyote, duck,
goose, raccoon, wildcat, hawk, turkey, moose, deer, quail, and squirrel."
"I'll bet making those records took some doing," Mac commented.
"Yeah," Barney said with a grin. "I hadn't thought of that.
Anyway, I somehow didn't feel it was quite cricket for me to hang around and
shoot his crows, although he invited me to do so; so I started home, and on the
way I ran across a hound dog acting most peculiarly. Twice I saw him take off after
a rabbit, but each time he came to a screeching halt and started whining and shaking
his head. When I found the owner a quarter-mile down the road sitting on a high
knoll and holding what looked like a walkie-talkie, I learned the reason. He was
using an Electronic Dog Trainer to break his coon dog of chasing rabbits. The animal
was wearing a light, waterproof unit on his collar that gave him a light shock when
the owner actuated the hand-held transmitter. The guy told me the trainer would
work up to a half mile and was dandy for curing dogs of biting, chasing cars and
bicycles, or even barking excessively. He claimed only a few treatments were necessary
to convert an ill-behaved dog into a canine gentleman; then the collar unit could
be removed - at least until the dog developed another bad habit you wanted to break
him of."
"You've convinced me there's no getting away from electronics," Mac said, "but
now, if you don't mind, I'd like to talk to you about something a little closer
to home. I mean the problem of having to decide whether we should fix a piece of
electronic gear that comes into the shop or advise the owner to junk it. That problem
is becoming hairier by the day."
"How's that, Boss?"
"A lot of factors bear on the problem. A big one is the fact that there is a
widening gap between manufacturing and service costs. In the electronic industry,
it's a lot easier to automate manufacturing than service; and the only way to hold
down costs these days is to eliminate human labor as much as possible. Printed and
integrated circuits help the manufacturer do just that; so we end up having a highly
trained person working on a cheaply produced piece of equipment."
"Yeah, and don't forget the very techniques that make automation possible render
the finished product more difficult and tedious to service. No wonder it's often
as cheap to buy a new transistorized radio as it is to have the old one repaired."
"That's right," Mac agreed. "I'm sure most of us would rather service a roomy
hand-wired chassis than one of those crowded printed-circuit jobs, but service on
these older sets is expensive, too, because of the exorbitant prices on the obsolescent
tubes they use. I firmly believe the Golden Age of the a.c.-d.c. receiver was reached
with the five- and six-tube sets using 12SA7, 12SK7, 12SQ7, 35Z5, and 50L6 tubes.
Cabinets then were often wood and large enough to accommodate a decent-sized speaker,
to give good ventilation, and to permit the use of a large loop antenna. The chassis
was not crowded, and Rube Goldberg dial cord arrangements were the exception instead
of the rule. The sets were easy to service, and the fact many of them are still
working beautifully is a tribute to their simple, straightforward design and manufacture.
But the prices of the tubes they use have been jacked up and up until today retubing
one of these receivers costs more than the whole set did originally."
"Lots of these older sets are owned by retired people or others having a low
income," Barney observed. "If you tell one of these that he should junk his set,
that may mean he will have to do without a radio altogether. Seventy percent of
the people drawing Social Security have no other income. On the other hand, some
workers in the building trades have boosted their wages until they make more in
a day than the person on social security gets in a month. Unless the affluent person
has a sentimental attachment to his old radio - and such an attachment is by no
means unusual - he will be quite willing to discard his old receiver and buy a new
one. The rapidly widening gap between personal incomes has to be considered in suggesting
what is to be done about a piece of defective electronic gear."
"Ethics and motives also get into the picture," Mac said. "Take the case of the
service-dealer. There's always a temptation for him to encourage his customer to
discard his old receiver and buy a new one, even though the old set could be repaired
at a reasonable cost. Customers sense this. They often complain to us, when they
bring in the receiver the service-dealer said was not worth fixing, 'That guy was
a lot more interested in selling me a new TV than he was in repairing my old set.'
"Let's not forget that cuts both ways," Barney warned. "The service shop owner
who does not sell radios or TV sets may be just as tempted to encourage his customer
to put a lot of money into repairs when that money would be better spent on a new
receiver. Saying 'junk it' in this case not only means losing a lucrative service
charge at the moment, but it may well mean the future loss of the customer altogether
to the dealer who sells him a new receiver."
"The competence of the service technician also plays a large part in this fix-it-junk-it
advice," Mac explained. "If the technician is a poor one, he is at loss when he
encounters anything really difficult in troubleshooting or servicing. Rather than
admit his ignorance, he is likely to tell the customer the receiver is beyond repair.
All he gets out of this is his estimate charge, but he also manages to conceal his
incompetence. That often is worth a lot to him. Oddly enough, some technicians unconsciously
use this dodge to conceal their incompetence from themselves. They rationalize their
way into believing an astonishing number of radios and TV sets are 'not worth fixing.'
I call these fellows 'coroner technicians' because they spend a large part of their
time pronouncing equipment too dead to revive."
"The ones who lie to themselves like that are bad enough," Barney offered, "but
the fellows I can't stomach are the ones who, when they can't fix a set, go ahead
and gimmick it up so that any other technician who may try to fix it will have an
almost impossible job. I've heard them boast, 'If I can't repair it, I fix it so
no one else can!'"
"Fortunately there are not many of those, and even the Twelve Disciples contained
a Judas," Mac said philosophically, "but I think I've made my point that trying
to decide whether a set is worth fixing these days is not easy, no matter how honest
and ethical you try to be. Personally, I try to take into consideration the age
of the receiver, its original cost, its general condition and appearance, the cost
of restoring it to like-new performance, the cost of an equivalent replacement,
and the probable importance of the set to the owner. This last item includes such
matters as any sentimental value the receiver may have for the owner and whether
or not he can afford to buy a replacement. If I don't think he can, I hesitate a
long time before telling him the set should be junked. It's surprising how much
a good technician can do toward keeping an old set going with a minimum of cost
if he really tries, and in the case of some poor old person trying to hold body
and soul together with a meager Social Security check, I'm willing to try."
"Uh-huh," Barney said softly. "I've seen you try so hard you didn't even get
fully paid for the parts you put into the set. You just charged enough so the poor
customer could keep his self respect. You're a traitor to your Scots ancestry, Mr.
McGregor! But let me tell you my formula for deciding whether to fix or junk:
"I say to myself, 'Barney, you handsome Irish devil - that's the way I always
talk to myself when we're alone together - do you really know what's wrong with
this set and precisely how to repair it? If it were your receiver, would you be
willing to pay what you are going to charge the customer to have it fixed?' If I
can answer both of these questions in the affirmative, I go ahead and repair it.
If I have to say 'No' to that last question, I tell the owner I do not think the
set is worth repairing but that I am perfectly willing to repair it if he wants
me to. And do you know what? In a surprising number of cases, he tells me to go
ahead. Then I'm glad I did a thorough job of troubleshooting before I gave him an
estimate and my advice."
Mac's Radio Service Shop Episodes on RF Cafe
This series of instructive
technodrama™
stories was the brainchild of none other than John T. Frye, creator of the
Carl and Jerry series that ran in
Popular Electronics for many years. "Mac's Radio Service Shop" began life
in April 1948 in Radio News
magazine (which later became Radio & Television News, then
Electronics
World), and changed its name to simply "Mac's Service Shop" until the final
episode was published in a 1977
Popular Electronics magazine. "Mac" is electronics repair shop owner Mac
McGregor, and Barney Jameson his his eager, if not somewhat naive, technician assistant.
"Lessons" are taught in story format with dialogs between Mac and Barney.
