Old stuff

[Enzo]

Maybe I should browse for some naked lesbians riding motorcycles while skeetshooting - see what google ads does with that.


I remember saving up my sheckels and buying an Eico VTVM kit, which I successfuly built, and it served me well. In fact, other than the old D cell battery in it that leaked, it is still fine, across the shop from me now waiting for an overhaul and a return to nostalgic service. I was into building amplifiers, and I might have been all of 12 years old. I realized the need for a power supply and was building one when my dad came along, "Whatcha doing?" Told him I was building a 300 volt power supply for my little tube amplifiers. he said, "well, can't you make it for less voltage than that?" Um, sure dad, I'll try that.

So my VTVM on the shelf, I continued to learn, and felt the need to know what all these capacitors were that I was getting. The Eico (I was an Eico guy, my electronics buddy was the Heathkit guy among us) 950 RC comparator bridge looked appealing. It had a magic eye tube so you could balance out components or just measure them. I could measure resistors with the VTVM of course, but measuring caps AND being able to test them at up to 500v was real appealing. Plus you could even measure inductors as long as you had a refernce. Those mystery cap values would soon be mine.

So I told my dad I wanted to get this thing, and his response was something I never forgot, "Son, don't waste your money, you ALREADY have a tester." Yep, to dad, test equipment was test equipment, you didn;t need two. To this day, now and then someone calls about some piece of gear they want fixed and they ask, "Don't you just hook it up to a tester?" And I think of my dad.

But eventually I won that war, and my Eico 950 was a great addition. I could determine cap values and test them for leakage, and even watch them form up on the eye tube.

[txstrat]

Enzo
Have you ever considered writing a book? I really mean it. It is a pleasure to read through your lines. I'm eager for the next "chapter".
Maybe i'm a bit too nostalgic but what the heck...
Ummh... and I'm quite nosy about the naked lesbians... I mean just because of the motorcycles.

[Enzo]

Of course. I mean, would they prefer a two-stroke or a four-stroke?

Or maybe shooting skeet from a surfboard... yeah, that's the ticket... WHy it is all coming back to me now...

Skeet Surfin'
Skeet Surfin'
If everybody had a 12-gauge
And a surfboard too
You'd see 'em shootin' and surfin'
From here to Malibu
Because it's totally bitchin'
Ridin' wave to blast the pigeons
And it's so neat shootin' skeets
While you're riding out the heavies all day

First wave, don't get tired
Second wave, aim higher
Third wave, pull and fire
Skeet Surfin', it's alright

We're waxin' down our surfboards
And loadin' up our traps
Tell the teachers we're shootin'
We're never coming back
I've got a gun rack in my Chevy
For when the surf and the flak get heavy
And we'll have fun with our guns
'Till our lifeguard takes our ammo away

First wave, don't get tired
Second wave, aim higher
Third wave, pull and fire
Skeet Surfin', it's alright

First wave, get the knack
Second wave, pull the trap
Third wave, how's that?
Skeet Surfin', it's alright

Sharing sunsets with my favorite girl
When we shoot the curl, we really shoot the curl

First wave, don't get tired
Second wave, aim higher
Third wave, pull and fire
Skeet Surfin', it's alright

First wave, get the knack
Second wave, pull that trap
Third wave, how's that?

I wish they all could be double-barrelled
Wish they all could be double-barrelled guns

Skeet Surfin' can't you see?
Do you wanna come along with me?
Skeet surfin' can't you see?
Do you wanna come along with me?
Skeet Surfin' it's alright
Little girl we'll have fun tonight
Skeet surfin' can't you see?
Do you wanna come with me?
Grab your board, run to the beach
Skeet surfin' it's a lot of fun

(To the tune of Surfin' USA)


Take THAT, Google Ads.

[Bill Moore]

Enzo, did you ever get one of the X# project experimenters kit, I've forgotton the # of mine, but it basically was a circuit board with components soldered to the perimeter, connected to patch points. You would set the card in the center of whatever project you wanted, and you would use jumper wires to wire accordingly.
I'm not sure where mine came from, but my uncle helped me assemble it, and when he was on a carrier trip, he would send me his homemade circuit cards, sometimes with a note to also add X resistance or capacitance into the circuit to make what he had in mind. Don't know what the kids do now, looked for something like that for my oldest granddaughter last year, didn't find anything.

[Enzo]

I know those, but they came a little after my early experience. Seems to me I still see those 30-in-1 or 100-in-1 electronics kits. I have seen the ones with the circuit drawn on a card as you describe, plus ther were various ones that had components around the panel and an instruction book to tell you how to wire stuff. There were little coil springs you pulled up so they spread, stick a wire in the coil and let go. A latter day Fahnestock clip I suppose. I thought Radio Shack sold them even. Possibly Toys R Us.

[antiunderscores]

To me the 'good ol' days' is the late 90's so I'm obviously a bit young to be on the same tangent as the rest of you. But I STILL do those things Enzo talks about (forgetting the biker lesbian part which doesn't sound appealing at all, because most bikers i see have a beard and beer gut).

I get old TV's and VCR's etc that i find or get given to me and strip them out for resistors and capacitors. Sure most of them come from the 80s//90s and have fairly rubbish parts but you also get some really early transistor TV's that have carbon comp and cement resistors and the type of capacitors people try and sell on ebay for $10 because it turns your cash convertors Lespaul into a '59.

[Enzo]

Yeah, well some of those bikers ARE the lesbians.

Maybe you'd prefer the skeet-surfers.

I still love to strip out old stuff myself. When I get sick of doing real work, or my head gets out of whack, I go out to the warehouse, find an old VCR or cassette deck and take it completely apart. I find it very cathartic. And one VCR, especially one 20 years old or more, is a huge collection of metric hardware. Just from that stiff I have a large assortment of metric screws - black and cad plated both. But I take every little screw and clamp off it. I have a jar full of odd shaped spacers and odd bits too.

Inside the VCRs and cassette decks ther is very thin shielded wire running up to the heads or across the thing. I save those. That tiny wire is real handy and easy to work with when you want a little shielded run inside an amp chassis.

These days, now and then I have to replace a hard disk drive in some recorder or something. I strip those down too. Not much useful inside, very tiny screws in them. But it's fun. Soothing. Everything was so much bigger 50 years ago. Well, except my wife.

I don't know about down under, but in the USA, we just not long ago had teh mandatory conversion to digital TV, so there will be a lot more scrapped TV sets than usual for a while I wager.

[Tom Phillips]

VTVM

My first piece of test equipment was a Heathkit VTVM. My Dad and I built it on our kitchen table at the beginning of the glorious decade, the 60's. He taught me how to do point to point wiring and how to solder. I still have the instrument and the instruction manual with all the hand written check marks next to each assembly step. The VTVM is still a very useful piece of equipment and will out perform some modern digital instruments for certain tests.

Thanks for starting this thread Enzo. I too brought home those old discarded TV chassis. My first guitar amp was made almost entirely from salvaged parts. I hand wound the PT using the core from one of those old TVs. Great fun!

[Enzo]

I used to "do electronics" with a friend of mine back in grade school. One of us would pack up his bunch of stuff and haul it to the other guy's place, and we'd build things or otherwise screw around. Our little shops were amateurish, but hey, we were kids. My pal Pete was always more of the engineer, and in fact went on to get a degree in electrical engineering and he worked on satellite systems. He designed a little tape recorder and built it. He tried to make his own head, but discovered they are not just electromagnets. So a commercial head was bought, but he built the rest from scratch. Odd little thing, rim drive on the take up reel. But it worked. Then he made a curve tracer for these new fangled transistors. I was always more into short wave and audio. I designed hifi amps. I didn;t pursie electronics, I went to college as a physics major.

Anyway, we all had our little ways.

Pete had one I loved. You know those little hole re-inforcers for notebook paper? Little life-preserver shaped things with adhesive backing. You glue them to the sheet of paper around the holes so they don;t tear out of your three ring binder. Well, my buddy always glued one of those to his ground wires. We were always flagging wires with masking tape or something. His mnemonic was, "The round is ground." 50 years later i can still hear him saying that, it stuck with me.

The round is ground.

[antiunderscores]

@ Enzo:
Yeh, we're slowly making the switch starting from this year. But where I live (in the sticks) the reception isn't too fantastic as when you get a little break up it doesnt go fuzzy like analog it just has giant squares missing and makes horrible crackling noises. A bit like the difference between a small scratch on a record and a small scratch on a cd, or to be more relevant to this forum tube and transistor break up. Thats a good point I hadnt thought of, there will be quite a few TV sets out and about, so ill keep a look out for a golden oldie. But a lot of the modern stuff is all surface mount and as you said not much use. I remember a quote that went something like "surface mounted components arent much use to you... unless your a robot." It was once worded far better, it could have even been you who said that.

[Mars Amp Repair]

Too funny.
When I was a youngin' back in the 60's (I'm 57 now) I did the same thing Enzo & others are talking about here. I lived in a small town in N.J. and had the obligatory one TV repair shop that I also used to go through their garbage & pull out all the tubes I could find...take them home on my bike & test everyone of them with my little tube tester that I had gotten for Xmas at some point.

I was always amazed at how most of the tubes tested ok. I couldn't figure out why they would throw them away...of course when I started working for a tv shop myself when I was 15, I figured it out.

I also just recalled taking a b&W picture tube (about 12") from the TV shop & carrying that home in my arms quite a long way. It was pretty heavy for a 10yr old. On my way home there was this older bully kid in the neighborhood who started chasing me & I ran home the next few blocks with that damned picture tube in my arms...what a mess that would have been had i dropped it!

As for the picture tube, I stuck it in this old Admiral console tv that had a bad 10BP4 (sh*t! I can remember the #). Because the 10BP4 was a roundy and the 12" was rectangular, I had the chassis on top of the console with the tube perched there with the yoke & stuff connected to it...too funny...I had forgotten about that! Anyone remember the 'ION Catcher' adjustment?

We also had some local dumps that I would frequent on my stingray bike (with baskets!). I'd load up old radios & whatever like that I could find & take it home...mostly for cannibalizing. I also would categorize the resistors & components, but I started out using those cardboard Egg cartons carefully reading the resistor values from my resistor wheel & marking the individual egg spots with a pencil. I graduated to 3x5 filing cabinets later on for bigger parts, most of which like IF transformers & such that I never used. I just liked having all the 'stuff' around.

fortunately, my folks saw some value in all this & allowed me to have my little corner in the basement. They pretty much let me keep whatever I wanted.

I had to laugh to Enzo's label for the resistor held on with celophane tape. I was 'repairing' , as best I could at 10 with very little knowledge of what I was doing ;-], a Wilcox-Gay Recordio that we had gotten from a family friend and I ran out of electrical tape, so what I was doing was wrapping little strips of paper around the connection I had spliced & then tying a piece of that telephone cable wire around the paper to hold it in place...tooooo funny now to even think of that.

Unlike Enzo, I moved away from home at age 19 out of state & basically never returned to that home in N.J. My folks then moved to Texas & most of my cool old junk was tossed ;-[ .

Funny as a kid, I didn't know ANYONE else in my entire school that was interested in any of this. I was the ONLY kid doing this goofy stuff, yet like most of us I was driven & absolutely loved it (still do). It was basically a pretty solitary thing, but when not doing this I was a pretty 'normal' kid doing fairly normal things, too.

We had woods everywhere in N.J. & even at 7yrs old, we hiked all around usually all day without our parents knowing where we were. Boy I could never let my kids do that when they were growing up...kinda pisses me off that the innocence could not be allowed like we had as kids...but that's a whole other show...thanx, glen.

[Enzo]

Why as a matter of fact I DO recall the ion catcher. It grew up into the convergence rings on a color tube, I suppose.

[Danelectron]

Enzo,

Great stories. As a kid I couldn't wait for an appliance, TV or radio to cash out at home. I always got to tear them apart. Loved the smell of the old console record player electronics when they warmed up. The folks had an unwritten rule that I had to maintain any toy with a motor or battery for at least 6 months before I could tear it apart. Worked out good because my birthday is in July. Mom would have been mortified if she knew the picture tube could store massive voltage for long after it was unplugged. I never got any shocks though. Even when ( as my older brother told me later) I was about 3 and was goofing around with a steak knife and poking it into the switch that turns on the oven light when you open the door. My brother was sitting at the table eating corn flakes when I shorted it out. He said it threw a shower of sparks across the kitchen in all the colors of the rainbow and I was just standing there in the middle of it all looking up. For years later I would see that steak knife in the drawer and wondered about the tip that was burned off. I think they told me that story when I was 13 or so. I used to take the cover off the electrical panel in the basement when the folks were gone just to see what what was in there. I've been an Electrician for 30 years now and (knock on wood and everything else around) still kickin'. Though I have had my share of little shocks to develope a healthy fear of electricity. Don't, anyone, ever believe the "it's only 110 crap". I got a pretty good one working on a 50 volt phone line that someone cut trenching in the rain. It may have been in my head, but I swear I saw a rainbow halo around me. Maybe just a flashback to when I was 3.

Thanks for opening the trip down memory lane, Dan
P.S. One good thing about video games, most kids these days probably don't have the dangerous curiosities like we had.

[txstrat]

...dangerous curiosities like we had.

YEP.
When I was 4 or 5 me and a friend were riding in those old coal cars from a nearby coal mine complex. We pulled the drag shoes away and rolled down the line until we came to a switch. Then we would jump off and let the car leave the rails. I remember when we watched the men using a crane to put the cars on the rails again. It doesn't bear contemplating what could have happened to us.

When I was 19 or 20 me and a friend worked on a vehicles cylinder head and had to let the water out for that reason. So everything was sort of wet. I was standing in a pit on a steel ladder. Before my chest was the concrete floor of the garage, behind my back the front bumper of the car, when my neon hand light slipped out of my hand, fell into the pit and went out. I pulled it up on the cable , opened it to look if it was just a loose contact. It wasn't a loose contact the bulb was broken and I took ONE of the contacts into my RIGHT hand to pull it off the bulbs holder (I was already aware of the danger of electricity). The other cable was loose and when I tried to yank the contact off, the loose cable touched my LEFT thumb. I got shocked by two leads of cable sticking in the walls outlet from my right to my left hand and couldn't let go (I even couldn't fall backwards or forwards cause of the pit I was standing in). I was yelling at my friend like crazy, he should pull the plug out. He was working on the right side of the car on a workbench and had to go round the car, where the outlet was. He told me later, it was about 10 or 12 seconds until he could pull the cable out. I these seconds I feared to die. This is now 32 years ago and I still have the burn marks on my fingers.

[Mars Amp Repair]

WOW...you're definitely lucky to be alive...sounds like a scene out of a murder mystery...I still think of the original version of 'The Blob' movie where it got that got the mechanic who was underneath the car...always a bit claustrophobic in that kind of restricted position.

Since we're talking about shocks...I was about 17 (about 1970) and doing TV service calls late at night. I was behind on of those 'wonderful' Zenith 'point to point' wired color console tv's. I had the chassis pulled out to work on & had to reach up under the picture tube to adjust a control. For those who did TV repair back then these controls would be connected to those 1' long knobs that extened to the control panel in the front behind a flip-down access door that was below the picuture tube.

for those who don't know, Zenith was very proud of their 'point to point' wired chassis. that meant that they had a bunch of turret type strips that poked out the top of the chassis in which the wires were stuffed & soldered. Only problem with that was there were hundreds of these posts that stuck out the top of the chassis on which you could get shocked to death on.

You can almost see where this is going.

The lady who's tv I was repairing had her kids watching the tv as I was working on it. I was backed into a corner reaching up under the picture tube to adjust something & I got across what I can only figure was the 800V boost voltage. It threw me back up against the corner I was crouched in & knocked me out for about a second.

When I came to, the lady was leaning over the tv asking me frantically if I was ok. It must have make for an interesting effect on the tv screen as the kids were jumping & squealing saying "WOW THAT WAS COOL, CAN YOU DO THAT AGAIN!!!'.

Needless to say I packed up my stuff & told the lady it had to go to the shop...man! g