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It was surprising the mechanical spinning disk system ever made it to market. The imagery was not bad but having the outer disk speed was fairly fast. And the drive motors were not exactly quiet. A lot of female customers complained about the noise from the disk and the mechanical vibration that frequently occurred in the flyback transformer at 17,734 Hertz. Yeah women could hear it.

Another wart in early three gun color crt technology was adjustment of the screen purity for round crts. Early color crts used steel bells which flared to matched the crt face plate. Unlike later crts which used layers of aquadag to form the high voltage filter capacitor, the metal bell crts used doorknob capacitors and the whole crt bell was run at about 22 KV. The purity was adjusted by rotating magnets positioned around the edge of glass faceplate adjacent to the crt bell. The last one I worked on had 12 magnets and you best be extra careful or the shop owner would get a phone call about the foul mouth service tech sent to her home. getting a jolt of 22 KV while adjusting purity was a right of passage in the 50's.? And those doorknob capacitors stored a grunch of current. The later glass bell crts which used the conductive aquadag to form the HV Filter capacitor did not hurt as much when you accidentally came in contact. It still hurt, but not like a high Q doorknob dumping every last electron unimpeded into a finger tip. Aye Chihauhua!

Then there were the pets. In particular cats, and especially Siamese cats. I had removed one (a Siamese cat) from the inside of a customer's console color television several times while serving the set with the back off. Motorla used nickel plated steel pins inserted into the printed circuit board in that particualr model, then wrapped the interconnecting wires around the pins using wire wrap techniques. And they stuck straight up, just waiting for a careless finger. Nothing like impaling your finger tip on one and feeling the crude finish drag against the inside of your finger as you pulled back. Back to the cat.

I asked the owner to help keep him away from the set while I had the back off, as I feared he would be injured. I could just imagine the damage that bugger could do if he stepped on the bed of those wire wrap terminals in the chassis. She removed the cat and I proceeded to change out a tube here and there. I had just inserted one tube, plugged in the ac power (cheater) cord to power the set up and turned to reach into the tube caddy for a long skinny screwdriver, when there was a squall from a creature in pain. The cat had returned, crawled in with my back turned and apparently found a B Boost (about 800 volt DC) terminal. I saw a blur as the cat left at light speed, and just sat speechless over the carnage the cat had inflicted on that poor television. IF Cans, coil forms, laid over broken, tube pins were bent so badly I feared straightening them. Several wires were torn loose. The cat survived, but he did not intrude again during that visit. And I explained to an insurance agent how the customer's cat destroyed a color television.