 Yeah, so today I'm hosting my buddy Lewis, uh, Zez. He's in town from all the way from Estonia, and I'm going to show him some local things about this lovely town and the America, the real American way. And we'll see his opinions on some of the CRTs that I have here and the place that he's staying. But yeah, it's going to be an incredible time. So yeah, welcome, kind of welcome to America, right? Yeah, I love it. I love seeing this. I've never been in such a place before. It's great. Like, it is a little bit like, there's still some, I don't know, like, surrealness. Like, oh wow, that's a middle school. Like, even like, oh, that's a high school. Wow! I've never even seen one. What's the difference, like, in schooling then? I don't think there's necessarily, like, such a difference. It's more like, like, okay, this sounds so stereotyped, but it's like what I see in the TV shows, what I see in a TV show describing middle America, this is it. And I've never actually just spent some time in, just in a community before. And people do regular things, yeah, yeah, it's usually been like some big city or something like that or, so yeah, this is a very cool work we're driving around. Yeah, we're about to go, so we're about to go to this restaurant that's been around forever and we're gonna, it should have some interesting local cuisine here. So this restaurant is an old, like, dining car and it's been here for, I don't know the exact history on it, maybe I'll put that here or something on the screen, but it's been around forever and it's the place that my great-grandfather went and so it's been around a long time, it is, country is all get out, right? And I mean, it looks like, it's just a big solid, like, bar top, one bar top and you just sit in there and there's gonna be, like, some real construction-like style. You know, good old boys. Well, we're actually a little bit later, they've always, they'll keep it in that place, rolling, but the good thing is everything's in here is gonna be fresh from, like, farms and stuff from around here, all the food will be. So, but it's an old place and it's not, there's not really much modern to it. I like it. Yesterday we went out and had a fresh pretzel, soft pretzel cooked by, I don't know, you could see, I don't know how to describe it, like, very, I don't know, traditional clothes or you could see certain communities wear different clothes, had a little bonnet on the back there, like, wow, like a person that I never would meet in, in regular life otherwise. So it was so cool and just so many little bits of America. I don't know, the freedom, the little things that, that I love, maybe if you live in America or you live anywhere, you get a bit annoyed after a while, you're like, oh, with your own place, of course. This is all fresh and new, sunshine, some guys working on the street, good work, guys. This is kind of where, like, all the dodgy crackheads hang out up here for some reason. Off in the distance, you get a huge sign that says Pawn. P-A-W-N, by the way, Pawn Emporium Gadget Town. And that big, huge building off in the distance is like a feed plant that makes, I think, dog food or cattle food or looks like something out of, like, a dystopian novel. Just kind of rises out of nowhere. Yeah, like, no windows on it, nothing. And we're definitely not filming when we go in there. I might take a picture or you can pull your phone out, maybe make a little comment, but we will get, like, I'm afraid we might get stabbed. Nobody wants Instagram or YouTube influences. We're gonna look like some serious douchebags. Here it is, right here. Hey, let's come to Middle America. Look at these guys. Yeah, this is not gonna work. Did you say here? This, so, yeah, here. So this, we're pulling up right here, here's the dining car. We're gonna park across the street. Well, all right, let's do a little bit up front. Yeah, well, we're gonna park across the street here and then I'll let Louis hop out and look at it and we'll get a, we'll get a photograph of it. But so what about the breakfast, huh? Scrapple. Let's talk about Scrapple. I'll tell you. So yeah, Scrapple is like a mashup of leftover, gosh, pig parts from a pig slaughter and then like boiling the bones down and you boil that stuff off forever. And then you mix it with like almost a cornmeal style mix. And it comes as big ploppy like porridge looking thing. And then that's allowed to solidify in a tray and that's how it becomes that patty. And then after it solidifies and cools, you take it, slice it, throw it on that flat skillet with some oil and griddle it like that. Almost like. It's like a hillbilly spam. Exactly. This is straight up like a Pennsylvania Dutch recipe from gosh, hundreds of years ago. So that the idea is actually a good one where it's a no waste. Like we're not leaving any waste behind. We're using the leftover scraps to make an edible food out of it. And I've always liked it personally. I remember my grandmother like giving it to me growing up. I guess if you had it growing up, I would imagine. I tried it. It was fine. I could like take a bit. I definitely acquired taste, let's say. Oh yeah. Definitely. So but the sausage and eggs you would have had would have been locally. Classic. Made and everything. I'm sure that the sausage has a bit better flavor. We already met. We met some local personalities around. He's got a person. Old couple. And the first thing is this dude knows. He knows who Steve's father is. Like just start chatting. He's like, oh yeah. No, no, no. He actually knew like the people from my grandfather's generation. Grandfather. Okay dude. Like his brothers. And my great grandfather was the guy I was telling you that originally started going to L&S before we went in. So when this that's the man name I told him was my great grandfather's name. And he said, oh yes. I'm familiar with them. They were the stone masons, right? And I said, yes, that's it. So and then he asked me about someone that would have been like his son's age. So my grandfather's age. But yeah, an amazing, huh? And this gentleman had a Trump hat on and obviously got a lot of opinions. And I said that I was a leadership instructor and that I help companies, help teams get better. And his first response was, you got to get down to Washington and help them. And then his wife immediately turns to him with a slap and says, don't you start. Don't you start. She had to keep him in check. So yeah, right. He was about to get the whole, oh my goodness, poor up. I don't know. It might have been funny to make Lewis listen to that. I would be very happy to listen. I'll listen to your opinion. So again, because I'm not this every day, right? So I'm. But that's, hey, that's like I try to tell people that's the beautiful thing about still you can see in America. I think as long as people can go have a conversation and not be rude or hateful, these people are very nice to us. But it was, that was a little unexpected too, because it was also very, I thought it was funny that the restaurant was kind of open over on that side. And they literally sat right beside us, because it's a countertop, like I said, and they sat right next to us to the point where the waitress asked if we were all together. Just a good old couple, right? Right, good people. Good salt to the earth. So there you go, Lewis. You get to see even more. We had the breakfast and the diet now. And like you, yeah. I want to see every video. He's like, how'd you end up? They were like, how'd you guys end up here? And that's when I mentioned my grandfather. And they were like, oh, I said, yeah, he wanted to go somewhere local. And I was like, I couldn't think of anywhere more. And they're like, yeah, you can't get more local than this place. And even some things like, I know you did it a bit, Steve. And I do, I know I do it. Well, you have to simplify the story a little bit. So I'm not all full on like, I'm doing a string of comedy in Estonia and everything. And they're all like, like, you know, you never said, you said, the guy asked you what you do. You never said I repair TVs. You were like, I'm working on stuff. I'm doing things because maybe it gets too much. And I sort of said, I'm Australian. And then as I realized in the story, I'd have to say, oh, I live in Europe. I don't think I ever use the word Estonia, right? Yeah, I was really vague where I just said, you know, you and I had businesses that we like work together for our businesses. And had, you know, met years ago through the internet and through our businesses kind of thing and to give them. Because I mean, I, yeah, at what point I don't, for me, I'm like, I don't, there's sometimes I don't want to keep on going on, start going into the conversation of me. Because what if a guy like wants to go into that rabbit hole and then we talk 10 more minutes about myself, which I get to do plenty. So I was like more interested in letting them enjoy that. And yeah, but that was funny when his wife, man, she about, she about grabbed her purse and smacked him when he was wanting to talk politics, which I can appreciate. That's the funny thing is, what's the, you know, who's holding like the keys to the relationship. Yeah. We're mostly relationships in these areas. It's not those tough guys. It's those ladies, they got the, they got the power. So where are we going now? We going back, Steve? Yeah. Hey, let's, okay. We're getting close to where we may want to do, get ready for our live show. Yeah. When, what time do you want to do the live stream? Any time after 11 o'clock is fine. All right. Well, we got through that podcast pretty good. Pretty, pretty nice stuff. We had a good time, had a nice podcast. It was a pleasure to sit down and talk with Steve and actually, you know, here in person, not over the laggy internet. So thanks, thanks Steve for hosting me. I appreciate being here. Oh yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Anytime. So let's, you know, before we get into too much stuff out on the rest of your trip, let's look around at some, some items here in the shop. I'll walk you through it and we can kind of set, I'll tell you some special things about each one of them. So let's just get up and let's do it. Wander around here. Okay. We're going through the bunker. And Steve's laid out a few items for us here. Okay. So this first thing we're going to look at over here are some tools that I have set up. And for the most part, one of the more important tools that you're going to be concerned with is stuff like this, right? 240p test suite. Classic. Here's some actual hard copy versions of them. You know, you can download these for free, but you can also order this Dreamcast one is awesome. We've gone through it before, but it's, it's a great one. And Artemio and everybody he has over there really does a lot. And these are so super helpful, obviously here in CRT land. And so, you know, more tooling, more tools and stuff over here. Another thing is like, you got to be able to kind of test tubes. So I've got some tube testers here now to look at. First off, look at this thing. I have really no idea what this is. Right. So this was a gift from Bob and it just looks really cool. And I haven't even messed with it. So if anybody knows what exactly this precision apparatus does from the precision apparatus company of New York, looks like some kind of Ohms tester or something. And anyway, that's an item. Now this though is a tube tester right here. This is the first one. This is a old, man, this one's old. This one's from, I'm going to say 70s, maybe late 60s. I can't find an exact date right here in front of us. But anyway, this is a 445. I have actually seen people use these on Trinitrons. And I've never done it because for the longest time, people told me you could not use this one for Trinitron working. And so I've never tried it. It's just, again, more of a relic here. The one that's probably the most important is going to be this next one, which is this 467 analyzer here. This is, so this is a BK467 CRT analyzer to restore. This tool I had to go in and rebuild pretty much like 95% of the way. It is old too from the 70s. And you have to make sure it's working. And it was a pain in the neck, man. I almost burned the shop up a couple of times, just trying to get it to work. And something would short out and it would throw a huge spark, start sending fire flames from it. But once you get it working, it's very important because it can tell you whether you have a short in your CRT tube. And if there is a short, sometimes it can be removed with this device. So look at these things right here though. This is the biggest hurdle when it comes down to this machine is none of them come with probably relevant adapters anymore. These are all homemade adapters. These are two right here, actually really nice. These will fit about 90% of the arcade tubes that are out there. About 90% of them will fit either one of these two adapters. And again, these were very nicely made. It's sent over to me from Dell by Delugials Arcade. And outside of that, you have to use this, which is a universal adapter kind of plug all the probes on there. And so you have to do it that way, or you can make custom ones from old neck boards, which this is an example of that being done. But that's not very efficient. Basically, this is probably the most efficient way of using these. And then you've got to, so you do that, you get this thing working, and this can tell you things that you can't tell about the tube without the tool. You can't tell if there's a short going on in it without this, really. I mean, you can guess, but this is going to give you an exact answer. And then even sometimes this can go in and repair things that are wrong with the tube that could not be repaired any other way. So in a CRT shop, this is worth its gold once you get it to work, but it took me years to acquire something like this that worked. So that's the tools for testing. That's a better example of some tools that are testing and important stuff. Now, next to that, I'll show you the rack of, obviously, I'm a HACCO fan boy, all HACCO stuff here, just about, except for my, this is a hot air station. This is, you know, your exhaust fan to keep yourself from huffing all those lovely fumes, right? This is, I actually have two of these dual, dual guns right there, but this is the one I use the most. This is just an old back up HACCO. But yeah, obviously I have HACCO stuff. My other stuff's HACCO, most of it. And that's just a, you know, you don't have to use that obviously, but that's my favorite. And one of the other things was we've been talking about this year more has been the estate auctions, okay? So estate auctions seem to be a place where you can get random old tech for decent idea deals. And the next things that we'll look at real quick will be just a bunch of items that came from lots. Now this one I kind of feel like I got burned on because I got into like a bidding war on this lot of these old camcorders. And I think people are trying to get nostalgic for these things. So these are untested items. I think I paid like 90 bucks for these, both of them, which was too much probably. Anyway, if it worked, it would be great. But of course it needs a lot of work. I can't, and I've never even worked on these, but this is a sharp jet zoom. And it has the full cassette tapes from the late 90s. Very cool looking. I mean, it looks awesome. It works halfway, but if you notice, looking here, we've got like house screws right here used. Yeah, right? This is an item that somebody's poked around in probably a hundred times to try to either fix or see what's going on. And so I've never even opened it. I haven't spent the time to do that. But it powers on kind of. So there is life in it. But the cool thing about this is if you look in, you can't see it now, but this has one of those. This will have a CRT tube in here in this viewfinder somewhere in there. I mean, you can't see it because it's it's mirrored and it's not working. But that one and then next to that one is a little bit more modern Panasonic one. And this one actually does work. So you at least I've got this one that works. The the the the battery doesn't last and it doesn't hold a charge very long. You have to pull it off the charger and then you can record for about 15 minutes. But it has a screen here and takes like an SD card. Funny enough, but it also does tapes and it won't open, but it does have a tiny tape, like a smaller tape cartridge there. And that's, you know, some of the more that's more that's more like me trying to think about ways to, you know, try to be have some cool different stuff on the channel. But it's like what the heck kind of cannon worms that open up those things. I don't know that I don't know. It's like something you got to really dedicate time to. Some of my favorite CRTs up here are ones that I have gotten from the state auctions and it's just really, really old stuff for the most part. These are RF sets. This one thankfully has coax, but this is an old Montgomery Ward CRT. So it's I want to say it's early 80s. Same thing with the Sony. I've done a full video on this one, this KV9400. All right, next to that I've got this one, the KV1396R. And this is another really cool set from that 80s era. And then finally, you know, probably, probably my favorite set I have in here altogether is the KTV, KTV. And it's again, I like sets that have some kind of story to them or something. And what better story than to know that this was in an actual jail cell with somebody. And so I bought this. I've talked about it a few times from Texas, the lovely state of Texas. It definitely was in a jail. It's got a marking here where that's the actual prisoner's number. His name was Hall prisoner number 56902 982003. So this was etched and signed in. If you look back here, it's from 2000. This was from 2002 coax only. I modified it and added, it didn't have a speaker at all originally. Because if you had a speaker in here, then you could make a lot of noise in your cell and it would piss off all your cellmates and you might start a fight. So you would only have the ability to use it with a hedge phones normally. So I added a speaker, but I really like this one just because it's an odd ball. And it's like to think that you're going to have somebody's jail cell TV. So that was a fun pickup. We'll do a special quick shout out to this bad boy up here, right? Everybody loves the KV9 PT50, right? Is there one in here that you had any questions about? Let me turn it around for a second. What after Steve's tour? I did my own tour. Now I'm watching Steve's tour. The clear prison CRT looks way better in person. I've watched the videos, you've watched these videos, we've all seen this stuff. But to see the rear of it and how clear it is through that plastic, it's very, very clear. It's not frosted or anything like that. It's meant to be seen and I'm super, super impressed. If you had a lot of these new console shells that are coming out, Genesis Super Nintendo, what an amazing pair it would be. Well, yeah, that is very true and the reason is it had to be super clear so you could not hide any contraband back in there, you know? Like that was the deal. If you got your, if you got an inspection from a guard, they needed to be able to see inside there, you know, to be able to make sure you weren't hide anything. All right, so let's go here. We're going to check out some interesting stuff. And my storage area, which I have not been to in like four months. Who knows what's in there? So we'll see down here and see what we can unveil. Here we go. You know, this is actually less than I thought would be in here. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, what do you think? Look at this. This is like an electronics store from 1995. That's like, yeah, terrible. So you want this one? This is beautiful. Professional, beautiful, medical grade monitor there. Yeah, here you go. So I'll walk you through some of this stuff in here. So this is obviously an extra thing of bubble wrap. I mean, let's start here. This is just an awesome sharp Lennytron. Now this one does not power on, I remember, but I did not have a heart to get rid of it or the time to fix it. So there's that. Just this is just a dual cassette. Now this thing is cool. Yeah. This one is a three color monitors. And this is the same exact tube that's in the five inch PVM. It's okay. But it's just three of them together. Now they only do composite video and there's no audio on them. But it is color and they are the same tubes. So if you're desperate for parts for your five inch PVM, you can actually snag a bunch of these. And these are actually not that expensive. Like, I don't know, usually about 200 bucks. You can get that, which is less than you get triple parts. My I have a four, I have six, five or six of these five inch ones. And they're in a rack, like they're separate monitors, but they're in a rack like that. But I think they're a little bit newer. Logo kind of gives it away the age and the vintage of those Trinitrons. Yeah. So if I look like this is the, this is a 2030. But if you, can you see like on this, how there's a weird look. This has a freaking touch screen overlay attached to this tube. And that's what you're seeing there is the adhesive stuff used to pee. It's peeling off the glass and this whole set is, I think, pretty much dead, but it's parts mostly. But that's, that's what that looks like. Now, is that touch screen from sort of off the market? Yeah, it was completely aftermarket installation. It's crazy. Like it was it had its own hardware installed on the back end of it. And it was actually like hardwired into the other boards where they would actually get power off a spot and it was crazy. I can't believe it were like a company that was doing all that back in the 90s and earlier in late 80s. This is what I found in the garbage. This is like a 24 inch Dyna flat. And then, funny enough, this is the super flat. That's the Samsung, I think. Samsung? Yeah, looks like it. There's so much stuff down here. Okay. We have it done here. We got the. Yeah, this is an Olympus OEV202. That's back stock that these, again, these are all mine. But this one works. This one is a newer one. It does not work. I know that this works. This works. Behind there is a 2030. Again, that one does work under it is a BVM. That's that's the D series one, the multi format. That one has a bad tube. It's got almost 200,000 hours on the tube. So 200,000 hours. Yeah, it looks awful. It like flashes nonstop colors. Now, is that a little iMac? There's a little iMac down there as well. Yeah, there's a little iMac thing. There's a, this is an old RF black and white television. That's Magnavox. This works. It just looks terrible because the bezel is cracked on it. But it's the Sony BVM 1943 empty, oh, excuse me. But that's just a RGB monitor. That's a, that's a bunch of parts, right? I don't know that there's much. Oh, there's a BVM back there too. That's an old one. It needs a full recap. Full cap, it says on there. Yeah, it needs a full recap. It's got bad caps all in it. So that's at least three, six, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, like 16. And there might be something else under there. I don't know. Let's see if anything's hiding under here. That's just a bag. Duff a bag. No, cash? Nothing. No, unfortunately no cash in there. This is just a money pit now. Actually, now that I see this, I got ideas to put more CRTs in here because there's not, there's more space in here. You can go north. Yeah, you go. Because that's the only place I've got is to go up. That's pretty high. You can, that's, that's, yeah, I need to put a rack in here and try to go higher because I don't want to put them higher on top of each other. But I would predict that these, so I'm not sure. I really like this Samsung Dynaflat, but look at it. It's just, I mean, it looks like, it looks like people are like hawking loogies on it, like of soda or something. It's just nasty. But I found both of those on the street. Actually, my wife found them for me. So she said, hey, there's some of those TVs down the street on trash day. And I went and sure enough, there they were. She was like, yeah, you're gonna go get them. So I went and got them. This was one that belonged to Bob and he was, he was like, Steve, this is my dream TV. And so I got it working for him. And I was like, Bob, are you sure this is your dream TV? And he said, yeah, I gotta have it. And I said, well, it's black and white. And he said, oh, can you sell it? I said, no, Bob, nobody wants a black and white TV. So here it is. It works now. So is it that old school styling, that real classic retro styling that attracted everybody wants something? Everybody wants one of these like this in their collection now, I think, right? I mean, this isn't oversized to the point. I think that that's what happens. You start getting some CRTs. And I know with Bob and his CRT wall, he's got to have, he likes to have one for each thing. Like these are, if you have a color, if the sharp worked, it would be nice. That would be a nice one to have to work for like Atari or something. Of course, I have so many look that look like that now that we've seen before, but that's one that I just haven't gotten rid of. It used to work. So I know it's just an issue of something gone bad in there that I haven't fixed. But yeah, this is, that's it. That's the full thing. So whenever I inevitably pass away and the payments stop, the whole. This is what the children get. No, that's what I was going to say. This is what like the whole neighborhood can come down here and do an auction over. This is going to be on episode of Storage Wars in about 20 years. Storage Wars is coming down here. I don't know what we found. We found a gold mine. Yeah. And then it's junk. Junk sets. Look at these old TVs. Nobody wants this. I shouldn't have paid too grand for this storage room. Yeah. I'm really surprised that I thought there was more in here. I must have taken something out last time. Dad would come back to fill it back up. So that's the thing. I need to get more CRTs, right? Always more. We can get more here. That's it. All right. So it's been a couple of days now since I dropped Lewis off at the airport. I just want to say it was an absolute pleasure to host Lewis. I loved having him here, and it's really unbelievable to me that as a grown 40-year-old man, I'm still able to make these kind of connections in my life. I met Lewis completely online, and he kind of just reached out to me, finding me, asking me to do, I think, a podcast with him. We really hit it off from that first podcast. And then I asked him to do the Cathode Ray podcast with me, which has been off and on going on now for years. And so if you want to see some more stuff from our adventure, Lewis does have a couple more videos coming on his channel. So do please check those out. But again, thank you everybody for watching and getting a glimpse into just small town America and CRTs, a little bit more behind the scenes from what we do here and how amazing the world can sometimes be. And heck, we give the internet a lot of crap, but sometimes really great things can happen online. So that's my message to everybody. Thank you again for watching today. I'll see you next time with some more retro content. Here we go. What do you think? Lizards. Yeah. We are about, what does that say, 15 minutes of tip-off here. Hey Lewis. Yeah. Right? Hell yeah. I'm loving it. We're here. I've never been to a college basketball game before. Loads of kids. We're having a good time. It's massive. Here. Here. Cheers. Thanks, mate. Thank you for bringing it. Do it. Finish off the away team. Four minutes. Let's do it.