The old fire-horse hears the alarm one last time

Well, the jig is up, the cat has left the bag, the beans have been spilled, and I know not what the future may hold. Twenty-seven years after I firmly swore off the whole business on admission to graduate school, it seems to have been generally revealed that during much of my former life I was deeply involved in fixing audio equipment, e.g. stereos, radios and the long vanished tape recorders.

I realized the truth the other day when a nice (and persuasive) lady showed up at our door carrying an enormous cardboard box. Inside lurked a sullen, silent combination radio and record player. “It just quit one night,” said she.

“Okay, let’s have a look,” said I, resigned to my fate. I cleared a space on our combination dining room table and clock-repair bench: stereos are lots bigger than clocks, and I worried where I could possibly keep the thing.

So I got to work. Home audio hasn’t changed much since the Nixon administration, it seemed: the same Oriental plywood was stuck together with dozens of little screws and the icky brown glue with which they inexplicably try to seal the internal electronics.

Some digging eventually revealed a blown power fuse. But fuses seldom blow without reason, so I set forth with my $6 Harbor Freight digital multimeter, probing the works to locate and excise the evil, defective parts. Usually it’s the audio power transistors, but for some reason they weren’t guilty this time.

Nope, it was the power-supply rectifiers, which never fail, except that this time they did. I wrote their part numbers in my makeshift pocket notebook—in the ‘70s I’d have inscribed them on the insides of a red RCA vacuum-tube box, as did every repairman then — and set off for Lancaster’s only electronics supply house, bless them, on Hocking Street.

I walked into the Electronics Supply Company’s little store, which smells just like every other old-line TV parts shop, and I was transported 40 years back in time. There were all the old parts displays: rotating racks of resistors and walls full of transistors in blister packs. The young man at the counter was polite and helpful—perhaps a scion of this family business—and there was a black-and-white store cat.

Home again: I dusted off some rusty skills to solder the new parts onto the stereo’s circuit board, which some overzealous worker had glooped full of brown glue.

The Moment of Truth in electronics repair comes after you’ve replaced bad parts, checked for short-circuits, and partially re-assembled the device. Make sure the power switch is off, find and plug in the power cord, say a prayer and push the power switch. Would it just hum? Would the dreaded acrid smoke begin to curl out of the works? Would the new fuse blow?

Nope. The dial lights came on and stayed on. I turned the selector to FM, and a local station came blasting through. It’s always the finest music in the world.

Mark Kinsler is a science teacher from Cleveland Heights who lives with Natalie and the cats in an old house in Lancaster, where he dearly hopes there are other electronics repair shops. He can be reached at kinsler33@gmail.com.