The Laws of Electronics

Tenth Law of Electronics. That red color on the collector plate of a transmitting tube is not paint. Remove power immediately.

Al

| Anyone want to add to this?

First theorem of electronic operation: All electronic devices are powered by magic smoke, and will stop working if you let too much of the magic smoke out.

(It's not really a law, so theorem it is!)

and you haven't seen the Electronic Smoke recharging kits being sold on EBay ?

Jamie wrote:

It's a ripoff. The smoke must have a specific density. Altering the density by replacing it with smoke of a different resonant frequency will cause circuits to behave differently.

For RF circuits, if you let BLUE smoke out and replace it with RED smoke, the resultant resonant freq will be lower. Throws off tuning dials.

Audiophile AF circuits have individual hermetic canisters filled with smoke at a specific density. The best ones have 31 different densities (1/3 octave each).

Guitar amps for blues players, typically will have smoke from hickory wood and swamp ash. Amps designed for heavy metal players will have smoke from mercury or lead.

A lot of current day "60's retro" guitar amps have smoke from imported hemp. The tone of these amps doesn't even come close to the tone of original 60's amps with Colombian cannibis smoke.

Lump

Some more...

Transistors are available with the legs in different orders (CBE, EBC etc). In fact every permutation is available except the one you used for the PCB layout.

Soldering irons that heat up "instantly" take too long to heat up.

Tiny SMD components make you sneeze.

Never let an electrician measure your IQ with a mega.

Not to encourage drift, or anything (who, ME?), but has anyone tried one of those little "Cold Heat" soldering gadgets which have been showing up on the late-night-TV informercials and such? Something like that would be really nice to toss into the travel bag, but being a naturally cheap sort I'm loathe to fork over the $19.95 to try one out sight-unseen...

Bob M.

Oddly enough, Colin did.

Yes, I bit. The wire stripper that came with it works really good on most wires. 22G or less solid wire will just be severed.

I put 4 rechargable batteries in mine. It works OK when you can put both sides of the electrode onto the conductive surface. I pushed a little too hard and broke off the tip of the carbon (??) electrode. It works OK for desoldering, but there is no way you can "tin" it for soldering.

If the wire stripper doesn't come with it, forget about it.

Al

OK, thanks to Al and Jeff for the responses; looks like my first instinctive reaction (which is never to buy anything from infomercials) was right...

Bob M.

There is no such thing as a purely digital circuit. Electromagnetic compliance testing proves this daily.

Cheers

PeteS

In response to what PeteS posted in news: snipped-for-privacy@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:

Amplifiers oscillate. Oscillators don't.

That's Murphy's Law of amplifiers and oscillators. :-)

Tom

You will be wearing shorts when you slap you knees together to catch the molten solder ball rolling off the bench.

The recoil from a solder sucker is inversly proportional to size of the item being desoldered.

When replacing a small SMD part by hand (such as a 0402 resistor or cap), the success of the operation varies inversely with the correctness of the replacement part.

Cheers

PeteS

Good stuff... :-)

Don't put your solder station next to the telephone...when you drop the iron, don't try to catch it, let it hit the floor...never tongue-test a wall-wart. Hope I haven't repeated anybody's thoughts. :-)

Tom