hello everybody i'm dr nick riviera no i'm not i'm just quoting the simpsons because
it feels like i feel like quoting the simpsons today i was just reading the oral history of
uh the monorail episode which i had not i did not know until now today i learned that
the monorail episode was written by a young conan o'brien who sold three three three scripts three
plots of of the simpsons in one pitch meeting for that one at any rate hello everybody adam
savage here in my cave answering questions from tested patrons and uh today's question comes from
chris scott thank you chris for submitting this question chris says my father always said
son never try to repair a television or a garage door yourself lol so my question to you is there
anything you personally consider too complex or dangerous to attempt a repair even with a
do not try this at home disclaimer that's that's a good one that's a good one i like that question
um first of all i have repaired a garage door they're not that difficult uh i have
also repaired a television but the televisions i grew up with were cathode ray tubes
which is effectively a particle excel a linear particle accelerator uh with a giant vacuum tube
and the electron gun sprays electrons on the screen of this vacuum sealed cathode ray tube
and creates television yeah it's totally amazing television by the way invented by philo farnsworth
here in berkeley california and if i remember the story correctly his brother taught himself glass
blowing just so he could reliably blow the tubes for philo to make the first television
but a television that i grew up with one of the crt televisions i
played around with them all the time and used them in all sorts of different sculptures little tiny
four or five inch televisions some bigger ones and the thing is is that one of the parts of making it
work is that there's a huge amount of capacitance i think in the outer frame of the screen i can't
there's basically a conductive strip around the the outer edge of a crt television cathode ray
tube television that um is effectively a large capacitor and a capacitor is a method for
storing some power and usually it's between thin films of metal that are very close to each other i
don't know quite how it works on the outside of a television but one of the things that a capacitor
does with its stored power is if you touch its two leads it dumps that power so i used to hear about
a prank that uh a electrical engineers is to play with each other which is they take a cathode ray
excuse me they'd take a capacitor uh sharpen the ends uh charge it up and stick it in someone's the
cushion of someone's seat so when they sat down they got an electrical shock this is a terrible
idea and i don't think that's funny at all that is a terrible thing to do to a human being and i
don't advise you to do it and i'm not suggesting at all that anyone should try that please don't
pranking is mostly cruel however when you're repairing one of those televisions if you
touch the outside edge and you haven't properly grounded it you will get the shock of your life
and the shock feels um like getting hit by a cow fence which i have also been shocked by um
but you asked me a question i haven't even gotten to the answer yet and the answer there
is something i don't want to repair uh when we bought our house here in the mission district of
san francisco uh more than a decade ago it had one of its previous owners was a couple of um wealthy
google people and they made some delightful improvements to the house and one of them is they
made a they put in a built-in espresso machine now this is not something i would have ever
put in my house because it's this giant chrome electra single station espresso machine we stared
at it for four months before hiring a barista from uh from ritual coffee to come and spend
a couple of hours one afternoon showing us the ropes and we've been using it ever since
but occasionally we have to get it fixed because it's full of all these valves and
very hot things and i understand how it works i get boiler in the steam and the way it goes
but there's no way i want to try and repair steam valves in a pressurized system
thing i get that i could probably pull this thing out and figure out what was wrong with it
i just don't want to i don't like pressurized systems i don't like stuff that gets super hot
because it's failure mode is can be awful uh so for the espresso machine which is currently broken
i'm gonna hire a professional to fix it as i have done i think twice before every time we get it
fixed by the way same cost it costs the same amount every single time 275 i know why don't
you just buy another coffee machine i get it it's ridiculous that's why we haven't fixed it because
well we used i the the reason it's broken right now is we use the hell out of it for
the first five months of covet we didn't go to ritual coffee we just bought their beans
and i made coffee every morning but then when we started getting back into going out in the world
it felt very stabilizing for me to see the crew at ritual again and they said the same thing hey it's
good to see you regular um so i haven't i don't have a burning need to have it fixed right now
and i don't need to spend 275 dollars but i guarantee you that's what it's going to cost
i'm trying to think if there's anything else that i don't want i mean you know i don't work
on my car much anymore i pay a professional to do that i can do the work on my car
but i actually the main reason i don't do my work on my car is that i don't have a space to put it
i have worked outside the shop here on my car but you know when you're working on the street
as i have done my whole life you got to take all your tools in every time you want to take
a piss and that's ridiculous that like knowing that that's not any way to go fix your car um
but that's not like a fear of the repair that's more just like the comfort of being
an adult human who'd rather go home than be on the street lying under their car
you know yeah it's par for the course like get a professional to repair it it's still really
important to learn how to repair your own car and it's still like a critical thing in my in my
estimation and maybe that's something that's going to go away when cars are all electric i don't know
you know they're more and more they become black boxes and harder to fix
but their youtube channels devoted to hacking teslas now i'm just rambling
um chris scott thank you so much for your answer i'm sorry to give such a fancy pants answer as
my electra espresso machine is the thing i won't repair but there it is i can't change reality
thank you so much for the awesome question chris thank you tested patrons in general
keep submitting your questions and i will keep answering them thank you see you guys next time