How To Align a
Radio......
With Explosives!!!!!!!!
Ok, this is totally drug related or, at the very least, a shining example of impaired judgment taken to the extreme, due mostly to the effects of Budweiser.......
Anyway, to make a short story long.....
The time was the early 80's, and Art had picked up a VHF marine band radio from a local hamfest with the hopes of using it on his boat, which he kept down at Barnegat Bay New Jersey. This was a timely thing to do, considdering thathe never had one before and, after some interesting close calls out in the bay, you never know when he might need one. Anyway, this radio turned out to be an old tube-type clunker with only a handful of channels, and manufactured at the old 10 watt power output level. The seller at the hamfest claimed that it worked, and the price was right (cheap!). So Art bought the radio, took it home and hooked it up. On the initial test, the radio did seem to work to some degree, at least on receive. But despite the fact that the radio did seem to work, the radio was also hiding a sinister little secret which we were about to find out about (Or at least Art was). Like I said, during that first test, the radio did seem to receive, as Art could faintly hear another station on the same channel. It transmitted too, but both the power and audio seemed a little weak. So Art decided to pull the cover off to look around at things and to give it the golden screwdriver treatment. It's probably helpful to mention at this point, that Art was not the world's greatest technician. He generally had better success at creating strange electronic gadgets, than repairing them. But what the heck, it was late at night and there were plenty more cans of Bud in the refrigerator. So as Art settled down to do some serious rearrangement of the radio's insides, he started unscrewing the PL-259 antenna connector at the back of the radio so that he could pull the cover off with one hand, while holding the case with the other. As he was prone to do, he left the radio powered up during disassembly, and as the antenna connection broke, Art suddenly found himself becoming the circuit component between two opposite potentials at a substantial voltage. "AHHHHH!, F*ck!" was about all you could hear at that point, as Art hastily let go of those two opposite polarities, with the radio hitting his workbench with a resounding thud. It would seem that even though the radio chassis was supposed to be at ground potential, it had some leakage current through a transformer insulation breakdown, or something similar, which caused the chassis to "float" at a voltage potential much higher than ground. Not a lot of current, but enough voltage potential to give it a nasty bite. Being a tube radio, the plate voltages ran at a few hundred volts or so. The bottom line being that this was not the most technician-friendly radio to work on. The radio was then given the well deserved nickname of: "The Shock Box". A name which we would refer to it as from then on.
Following his initial wake-up shock, Art would try not to disconnect the antenna cable without disconnecting the power first. But it seems no matter how careful he was, he would eventually find himself touching the radio, and then unconsciously grabbing some other grounded metal object, (like his D-104) and getting a nasty shock. This would happen a few more times....... Then one night, after surviving a particularly nasty jolt, he finally had enough. As luck would have it, on that fateful night, I happened to be up there when Art lit up like a Christmas tree. If he would have had any hair on the top of his head, it would likely have been smoking at this point. He was more than a little rattled, and what happened next was classic. I sat there, not knowing quite what to say, as I watched a seemingly possessed crazy man take the radio out into the back yard. I quickly followed and watched as he placed an M-80 (1/8th stick of dynamite) inside the case. Never one to pass up an opportunity to blow something up, once I realized what he was about to do, I carefully helped him put the cover back on the radio so that the M-80 fuse was slightly protruding from the back of the cover. We then placed it on a cinder block in the middle of Art's back yard and he lit the fuse, and we both ran quickly for cover.
BAM! The neighborhood tranquility was suddenly interrupted by a bright flash, a loud bang, the neighborhood dogs barking, and a mushroom cloud of smoke. When the smoke cleared, after what seemed like a long time, we cautiously returned to ground zero to survey the aftermath. The radio's top cover was bulged out considerably in the middle. If a radio could become pregnant, this is probably what it would've looked like. The front panel had also blown out and the top half was folded over onto the bottom half. All of the tubes had shattered, and all that remained of them were one or two pins still clinging on defiantly to their sockets. Many of the other components also bore little resemblance to their original form and placements. I wondered jokingly, whether we should plug it in and see if it still worked. Needless to say, that was the last time that the shock box ever shocked anyone. Both Art and I seem to remember him taking pictures of the aftermath but, to date, all searches have failed to produce these pictures. I keep hoping that Art finds them, as this is something that must be seen to truly appreciate.
The moral to this story, is that if you're a radio which exhibits a particularly bad habit, you're sitting on a hamfest table, and you see a guy wearing an army jacket with the pockets filled with cans of Bud coming your way, Hide!