Man, I had one of those. Much like you I started disassembling things, I still remember the first time I found a charged capacitor.
I love those build-your-own electronics kits. It’s how I got into radios. My very first radio that I built for physics class in high school didn’t work, and I didn’t have the knowledge to troubleshoot it. Thinking back, I wish I’d known about continuity testers, because the problem was probably in one silly joint. But there was no support for electronics in my school, and all the other kids made baking soda volcanos.
I wonder if they still make those kits or if they have been replaced with logic kits instead?
I once tried to build my own VCR. This was before I understood how tuners work. I was trying to record everything from the antenna input. Strangely, that does not work. :)
And fire, there was no support for electronics in my school either. Auto shop, home economics, music, art … but nothing even remotely related to electronics. You should have built a remote detonator to blow up the baking soda volcanoes.
They do. I recently bought one for my daughter. It really looks old school compared to her other stuff, but she finds it fairly interesting.
I never had one as a kid, but I bought cheap appliances at our local flea market and took them apart… and like Kerzain I vividly remember my first capacitor.
I remember taking apart a flash lamp to make a kind of a ray gun. Yeah, there’s nothing like the whine of a nice big capacitor charging up… There’s also nothing like the smell of an electrolytic capacitor boiling when you’ve stupidly put it in backwards.
Silently is a plus, they’ve always tried to sell me something extra.
Yeah. At least he didn’t ask you to join the battery club.
I’ve waited all my life for an invitation to that club.
So weird. My wife and I were out shopping today and I saw a Radio Shack store. I was surprised that they still existed!
There was a time in my youth when I spent a Christmas season at Duh Shack. In January they asked me to become a store manager. I thought about the incredible opportunity of working 6 days a week for 16k a year with a minuscule % cut and decided that getting shot at at my local 7-11 while working the midnight shift would be a better option.
I had the 100-in-one. Many good times had, but I really never grokked capacitors and transistors to the point where I could invent my own circuits with them.
Still don’t, really. Which is, I guess, why I went into CS rather than EE. :P
I had the 200 in 1.
I’m with Rimbo, I got too annoyed trying to get all the wires on the complicated ones, never could figure why it worked, and went and wrote software instead.
Well, one of these days I want to grok them. I want to get a kit like that and spend time with it until I can build a circuit. Not just what they do –*I mean, I can plug numbers into C=Q/V all day, but that’s not nearly enough to know how to build a radio or amplifier.
C=Q/V? How useless is that?
ELI the ICE man, that’s where it’s at.
Rimbo and XPav I never ended up in EE, either. My love of electronics was overshadowed by my love of computers, quite quickly too. I went MIS versus CS though. The chicks were hotter over in the school of business. And really, that’s what college is all about.
That’s definitely true in general, and becomes even more true when you hit grad school.
There are, however, a handful of rare exceptions. :)