Green.

I didn't realize that it was possible to build a vacuum tube rectifier with lower voltage drop than they had back in the fifties.

One of my personal just plain WRONG items was a workbench radio that I made from an old fifties car radio. I wanted to keep the car radio because, as with most AM-only radios, its reception was phenomenal. It's another of four or five radios I had here in Southern California when I was growing up which would always tune in KOMO in Seattle, KOA and KOB in Denver and Albuquerque, a station in Norman OK, and sometimes WLS and WWL in Chicago and Now Orleans.

Anyway, I removed the vibrator from the car radio, installed silicon diodes, hooked it up to about a forty pound transformer a ham operator gave men, and because 60 Hz was so much lower than the vibrator frequency, added probably 30 microfarads of capacitance to the B+ filter. That whole mess is why I say it was jsut WRONG. This was so early in my "career"* that I simply assumed things would be okay with the much much much lower forward voltage drop across the silicon diodes. Damn thing worked for ten years, then I moved on to other things.

*We know what "career" means as a noun. It's amusing that, as a verb, it means

Some of us have careers like that, don't we?