How did your interest in electronics ignite?

[G8UWM-MildMartin]

The ones with the black plastic covers also had the dolly in contact with the moving contact, and were not suitable for mains. And I'm not admitting how I know that!

[Argus25]

It is a theory, but I think there is an element of truth in it. I was born very prematurely and spent most of my early life in an incubator, very close to death. A risky proposition in 1958. I think I bonded with the incubator, well really, I'm sure of it.

I found from a very you age I was very attracted to machinery, especially that made humming sounds and had lighted instrument panels. I couldn't get enough, feeling particularly comfortable with any type of lab instrument, especially with complex looking instrument panels and indicators.

Radios and TV's were a major attraction and I was dismantling them at 4 years of age trying to figure out how they worked. I built a mock radio at 5 complete with knobs, a speaker grill and was bitterly disappointed when it didn't work. I built a working one at 6 years of age and my first TV around 14. Mostly from scavenged parts. I was never happy with the quality of much of it then and couldn't afford new parts, so now I can afford it, I always use the best components possible for every job.

I remember the day with a group of medical students, we were were taken into the Physiology lab and I rushed towards the banks of rack amplifiers and oscilloscopes with glee (used for nerve conduction experiments) and had them set up for the experiments in no time, loving every moment of it, while most of my classmates avoided the multiple controls with apparent fear and loathing.

Also when I was about 15, I saw the inside of an Apollo capsule and recognized much of the componentry on the instrument panel and realized that space ships were made from materials I liked and knew, and that was very inspiring.

[Graham G3ZVT]

My first exposure to radio was at the age of 5 or 6 when my rigged up a longwire aerial and let me play with the crystal set he had built when he was younger.
The baseboard was slate and it had a lovely variometer for the tuning, one of these

https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/hilco_variometer.html

The mountings for the crystal and cat's whisker were there, but a modern (for the late 1950s) crystal diode had been wired across, I fully expected this to light up if a strong enough station was tuned in!
The set fed a pair of BBC (Ericsson) headphones.

My dad told me to tune through the station back and forth to find the loudest position, but I thought he meant if I kept doing that, the station would keep getting louder and louder, and of course, in my mind it did!

[Graham G3ZVT]

Originally Posted by Argus25

It is a theory, but I think there is an element of truth in it. I was born very prematurely and spent most of my early life in an incubator, very close to death. A risky proposition in 1958. I think I bonded with the incubator, well really, I'm sure of it.

I've nothing as profound as that to share, but at about the same time I was playing with the crystal set (in the earlier post), I was knocked down by a car whilst crossing the street, All I can remember is looking up at this machine over a hospital bed that was making me better. It was probably a portable x-ray.
My injuries were thankfully superficial.

Something else, my dad practised physiotherapy from home, and our front room was his surgery, and normally out of bounds for me and my sister. On the occasions I did get to look around there I was fascinated by the various instruments of torture he had in there particularly the console that applied "farradism" to the patient. Current surges were controlled by a flask behind a glass door in the console, presumably the flask contained a saline solution and a plunger was lowered and raised by a motor varying the current through the unfortunate vict^H^H^H^Hpatiant.

It was all gone before I was 7 and a piano and dining table replaced the IR and UVA lamps, but the fact I remember it so vividly and seemingly understood how it worked must have had an effect on me.

[Andrew2]

Some good (and familiar) stories here. As early as I can remember I had an interest in all things mechanical and electrical. This slowly refined itself into a liking for gadgets, electronics and radio - especially radio. PW and PE magazines were exchenged with like-minded souls at school and I joined the school's Radio Club.
My eleventh birthday present was a 'Tri-onic' experimenters' kit. It could make several projects, but I always built the radio and spent hours tinkering with it. The Lord alone knows how many crystal sets and transistor TRF's I built. Most of my components came from the tip, and often the house had a faint smell of hot shellac.
When I left school I went to Tech College to study 'Radio, TV & Electronics' and went on to work for a local TV rental company. After a brush with 'naughty radio' in the early 70's and again in the early 80's, I settled down and got my Amateur Radio licence in 1984.

[The Philpott]

I still have one of those miniature switches with the nickel plated cover. The other piece of required knowledge about them (apart from the cover being live!) is they have to be switched ON before the cover is unscrewed- otherwise the pin falls out.

'Patent No. 251757 - Not for mains use - Made in England'

The last bit probably at the insistence of the Scottish!

[cheerfulcharlie]

I had interest as a kid of anything with electric passing through it and put together those 10 bob crystal sets etc..school was not geared to anything electrical and was mainly interested in producing fodder for the local factories etc, so with other distractions I lost touch until I left school and indeed ended up in one of those dreadful, monotonous factory jobs..thinking there must be something better than that (and remembering those enjoyable electrical adventures when I was about 6) I started buying 'Television' magazine with of course the legendary LLJ..suitably enthused I went to one of those TV Warehouses advertised in there ..and there was stack upon stack of gleaming wooden case colour televisions .." 20 quid each mate, pick what you want"...well what could possibly go wrong at that price (even though it was great proportion of my wages).
However after heaving two of these monsters home and taking the back off I was in for a baptism of fire ..they were the Philips G6 and Visionhire had not gracefully retired them but had kept them to last point of multiple organ failure and death.
Later I never really understood who else would buy TVs from those warehouses..certainly not proper engineers, surely there were no other naive,idiots wasting their first wage packets about like me?


.

[Graham G3ZVT]

cheerfulcharlie, I fell for that one too, but in my case it was three or four G8s, which were a better prospect than G6s, but not being a businessman, I made the mistake of selling them friends, and then-after being called upon to repair them whenever we paid a social call. Disaster.

I got a LEGO lighting up brick and a battery (3LR12 type) for Christmas when I was nearly four (I was "well chuffed", try that these days for your only present*). Mother said "I will make it work for you after I have done in the kitchen" (fine cook my mother, worth waiting for). When she got back I had the thing working in a LEGO construction.

It is the playing with the invisible using man made mathematical constructions that has fascinated me since then (thank you mum, never a dull day in engineering). You can have a peek (with an oscilloscope for example) but never understand it fully, still it works.

*Anyone can buy an expensive present, getting a good one takes a real friend.

[Al (astral highway)]

Originally Posted by electronicskip

Whats your story?

Having endless time on my own as a child, I was highly curious.

I dismantled my first radio at 6 years old and did an autopsy on one of the valves, surprisingly carefully, without cutting myself or breaking the structures inside. I was mesmerised by its intricacy.

I also became fascinated by the ganged tuning capacitor, although it was years before I knew what it actually did. And the whole thing had an incredible smell, that I recall to this day.

I taught myself simple electrics with a bulb and a home-made switch (cut from a food tin) the same year.

I started electronics for real when someone gave me a copy of practical electronics as a teenager. I had no money and I had to use a giant brazing iron that I heated up on a stove, to solder, using little tabs of solder with ridges on them.

I made a crystal set with OC171 amplifier early on and then, using salvaged components from transistor sets that I got from a furniture clearance stall, I gradually expanded my knowledge.

I spent all my birthday and Christmas money at Tandy. I also spent every Saturday morning in the reference library, studying TV and radio repair manuals that were in hard binders. I had no money for photocopying so I either hand-drew sections or just remembered sub-assemblies off by heart!

By 14 I was using ICs. A few years later I repaired my first TV, a pre-1940's model.

I got commissions from teachers: one to build a remote-shutter release for aerial photography from a kite (although it took ages to work out the shutter release mechanism) and the other to show the score in say a basketball match.

[cheerfulcharlie]

Originally Posted by rambo1152

cheerfulcharlie, I fell for that one too, but in my case it was three or four G8s, which were a better prospect than G6s, but not being a businessman, I made the mistake of selling them friends, and then-after being called upon to repair them whenever we paid a social call. Disaster.

Ah yes, friends and the '10 year' guarantee...I remember that one

[G6Tanuki]

Originally Posted by astral highway

I had no money and I had to use a giant brazing iron that I heated up on a stove, to solder, using little tabs of solder with ridges on them.

I remember them: they were basically flattened Multicore solder, the ridges being the flux.

Intended to be 'soldered' using a match or a ciggy-lighter: I used some to repair the tractor-damaged intercom-phone cable between a friend's house and the stables [ which was about 1/4 mile away and had no mains electricity, heating, water or toilet despite a stable-hand living there throughout the year! ]

[Al (astral highway)]

I remember them: they were basically flattened Multicore solder, the ridges being the flux.

Intended to be 'soldered' using a match or a ciggy-lighter: I used some to repair the tractor-damaged intercom-phone cable between a friend's house and the stables [ which was about 1/4 mile away and had no mains electricity, heating, water or toilet despite a stable-hand living there throughout the year! ]

Yes, that's right!

That sounds like quite an intricate repair and an important one!

The solder melted into blobs very easily, I remember, especially with an uncontrollable heat source!

[Graham G3ZVT]

Reminds me of the time I had driven 100 miles on a Saturday to a service call at betting shop, the manager had spilled coffee into a numerical keypad and a PCB track had corroded away. Trouble was, I hadn't packed my soldering iron. I did find some wire an inch of solder at the bottom of my toolkit, took the keypad PCB to my car, and successfully used the cars cigarette lighter as an iron.

[Junk Box Nick]

This reminds me of my first forays into radio repair when still in short trousers. As my interest in radio (and pop music was growing), one Christmas I had received a small transistor set complete with earpiece. It wasn't long before the connection at the earpiece failed and I repaired it with a length of solder I had found in the shed using the hot end of a poker that I had heated up in the coals of the Rayburn kitchen range. I did this casually in the presence of my mother who wasn't in the slightest bit bothered at my antics. With daily use the connection would fail again and so I regularly repeated the process. Eventually, a birthday brought a soldering iron.

[Phil G4SPZ]

I can remember being fascinated by the warm dusty smell from my parents' Sobell radiogram as I watched the records spin round. I must have been no older than four or five. People used to give me old radios to take apart - I feel guilty about it now, and rarely scrap anything - but later I found a book in the school library called "The Boy Electrician" and built a one-transistor radio. I progressed to building a Gilbert Davey one-valve short wave set on a proper metal chassis and was hooked from then on.

[Paul_RK]

The initial spur for me was popular music. I'd listened much to Caroline and Radio London, then by 1968 at the age of nine I most wanted to hear AFN's output on 344 metres, and my Regentone Regenteener could only deliver it with much interference and fading. Visiting Fakenham auction one day, a very small number of shillings sufficed to buy me a Cossor Melody Maker (494) which seemed worth a punt in case it could do any better than the Regenteener. I'm not sure it ever did, but the next time I was free to go to the auction with a few bob in my pocket I gave some other radio the opportunity. One day a chap led me to the back of his van to offer me a Bush SAC25, 2/-, and Ekco A22, 10/- because of the unusual case. Fortunately I must have had at least 12/- with me that day, as I still have both radios. School terms, which I'd never been exactly fond of, were a most unwelcome interruption to my ability to wander into Fakenham on market day.

The emphasis shifted, I suppose, gradually from the quest for better AFN fidelity to an interest in the aesthetics, history and technical aspects of radios and TVs: indeed the acquisition of a wormeaten Columbia Grafonola about a year later led to my forsaking current music completely for a while in favour of Stanley Kirkby, Layton & Johnstone and their ilk.

Paul

[Beardyman]

For me it was my Father tinkering with clocks & the occasional radio, he had no formal training as he was a mechanical fitter but he had come through the "mend & make do" years. He basically handed that attitude on to me, if its broke then fix it or if you can't then make it do something else!
He would go "Tip Diving" as my Mother called it, the stuff he came home with was sometimes beyond belief.
My first foray into the world of electronics was when I was about 6 or 7 peering into the back of our Ferguson 461 at all the glowing tubes, the smell & the warmth. All very evocative.
Then Mother bought me a Denshi Block kit one Christmas, a truly wonderful thing as it could be so many things!
After that it was off to the library & every book they had to do with electronics, the rest is history.

[Graham G3ZVT]

I had a kit that used regular wire-ended components on a breadboard, which was a matrix of coil-springs. I can't remember much else about it, does anyone know what it was called?

[peter_scott]

Originally Posted by rambo1152

cheerfulcharlie, I fell for that one too, but in my case it was three or four G8s, which were a better prospect than G6s, but not being a businessman, I made the mistake of selling them friends, and then-after being called upon to repair them whenever we paid a social call. Disaster.

Snap! I didn't sell any to friends but I bought six G8s thinking they would be easy to fix and sell on. What I hadn't realised was that the sets I bought had been sin bins and so each involved fixing faults on several assemblies. I did get five working well and sold but scrapped the sixth.

Peter