Resources

[Enzo]

Here is a cool web site, Boat Anchor Pix. It has some cool pictures and stories about old gear. But down towards the bottom is a lot of good old reference material. SOme of it is useful when working on old stuff. Like old transformer catalogs - you can look up the ratings on a Triad whatever. Some general references and even some scanned books. And a lot of Heathkit schematics.

Boatanchor Pix

[nosaj]

You should make this sticky anhave everyondump sites here.

Grat site

[km6xz]

What an amazing collection...and reminder how old I am. There were only a couple of radios, transmitters, test instrument or devices I did not know intimately. I've had probably 1/2 of them and worked on the other half. Of course they were not considered boat-anchors or collectibles, they were useful contemporary units or not too long before replaced. I got my ham license at 10 and was active in building and repairing from a little before that. Opened a real repair shop at 13, one that I worked through high school, until I moved to San Francisco away from home in 1967. Growing up near a major USAF base and repair depot meant lots of access to surplus and nice examples of engineering. Rummaging through swap meets or surplus sales even now, it is hard to find some obscure module or sub assembly which I did not recognize and what it was part of. Some say Sputnik spurred the big developments in electronics in the 60-80s but I suspect having millions of surplus items of electronics after WWII accessible to kids was a big part of it. An ARC-5 Command receiver for example was $1-10 and contained some pretty darn good parts, plus worked as it. New JAN1625 or 807 power tubes were $0.25 each. My greatest disappointment with my parents was not moving to a rural area where we could have a gigantic barn to fill with electronics surplus. A kid could build ANYthing if he wanted with those treasure troves of parts and workable gear. As it was, I did take over the two car garage the roof, one bath room and my bedroom for all my gear, antennas and collection.

[g1]

The mention of boat anchors reminded me of BAMA : BAMA

[mrm0to]

I've spent a lot of time on that site just reading through his descriptions and talking about what needed replacing, etc. It's really a great site. Thanks for posting it!