Bygone tools

[Enzo]

As I go through the shop, I keep finding boxes of thing. I got to thinking about tools I once liked, but haven;t used in years.

The Wahl Iso-tip. A little battery powered soldering iron. Super light weight tip, the body about the size of a two D-cell flashlight handle. Had a little charging station. Haven't used it in years.

In field service, I carried my terrific Jensen tool box - the gray plastic kind the airlines cannot destroy. But loaded it weighs 50 pounds. Most times I'd go into a location and need just some basic hand tools for most repairs. So I carried an Xcellite 99 series handle and some driver blades, small needle nose and dikes. But I needed occasional soldering. This Wahl fit in my little hand grip tool case neatly. And it heats up and cools off fast. Great to solder just a wire or two. If there was a lot of work, I'd go get the big box, and all the tools. Here is the little zipper case tool kit:
Mini Cordura Tool Case - Tecra Tools
Haven't used that in years, I haven't done field service in years. But it was convenient and held what I needed for most work.

ANother soldering tool I used to use was one of those butane soldering irons. You filled its handle tank with butane like you would a refillable lighter. You turn on the gas and light it, and the tip heats up pretty quick, and it soldered pretty well. NO batteries, but you did need to refill it regularly.Haven't used that is years.

Lock picks. I used to work in the coin operated amusements field, and every piece of gear has at least one lock on it, and sometimes several. Keys get lost. Most operators have their own master keys on the main door, but the rear covers and access panels usually had random keys, which hung inside the coin door. Those get lost. SO I carried picks to open the access and read doors for service. (And I carried spare locks and keys so I could leave the place with keys hanging inside again.) A lady friend once locked herself out of her apartment, and i got many impressed her points by picking the door lock to let her back in. Haven't used them in years, not on locks anyway.

Manual drills. All power drills all the time these days.

I bet there are many other things I have forgotten about.

[olddawg]

Eccentricity gauges, tentilometers, alignment tapes, head pullers, alignment discs, EPROM flashing gigs, video pattern generators, VECTOR SCOPE. Distribution amplifiers, Channel traps. Sets of R/R tape tension gauges (the ones that look like tiny German fishing scales). How about the odd damn expensive Audio Distortion Analyzers that all the manufactures said you had to have to be an authorized servicer. I'm sure I don't have as much as you but I have a garage full of once very expensive and useful obsolete tools, including a couple of those portable soldering irons that always seemed to not work at the worst possible moment. Every once in a while I will go looking for something and open up an old factory labeled tool box full of specialized tools and jigs. Somehow it never seems to get thrown away. Mainly because within a month, even if I haven used it for 20 years, all of a sudden I (or some random person I know or meet) needs it. One of the finer stipulations of Murphy's Law I think.

[Enzo]

Oh yeah... VCR tools, used for ADATs and such. The plastic gadget that was shaped like a video cassette, but was just an outline, so you could trigger the system but have room to work on it. That thing. I have a cassette deck dual tension gauge. Looks like a cassette, but has two little dials. Yep, test tone tapes. For speed and wow and flutter. Got reel and cassette versions. Tape head demagnetizer. a couple small scales for measuring the reel tension and clutch on reel decks.

I have a couple older HP distortion analyzers. A 331a and a 333a. Later ones are more desirable, but... Never used them. QSC among others demanded we have them. When nsubulysses was in to visit, he was eyeing them, but I told him he really didn;t need one. Better places to put your money. Unless you want to be a QSC service center, I suppose.

I just moved my video pattern genny aside a couple days ago, and my big degaussing ring.

These days dollar bill acceptors on super market self-checks as well as vending machines all draw your bill in endwise, and they take every denomination. Back in the 1970s, there was a brand ARDAC and their currency acceptor was a tray deal you put your bill on, then shoved the tray in. HAven;t seen one in ages. But it was the first training lecture I wrote and performed. We used them in various places in change machines. The machine took US one dollar bills, and that's all. Useless now. But I have all the alignment jigs, and optical filters for the IR tests, and the test tools to clamp the tray in place, and so on. I even have my selection of fake dollars - mostly Xerox - that we used to test for rejection.

I do have an EPROM eraser, and somewhere a duplicator. I think it was good up to 32k ROMs.

Glad now I never bought that flyback and yoke tester I had eyed back when. Though maybe it would work on plain old audio and power transformers. But then RG's tester works well enough too.

Got a couple of CRT rejuvenator/testers.

[Mick Bailey]

Some of the old tools can still find an application in other fields, whilst others simply belong to a bygone age. When I started servicing disk drives they were run in a clean-room environment and the disk pack could be removed. I used to do head replacement and alignment on those. We had CE packs which were disks with specific alignment patterns. You hooked up a scope and got 'cat's eyes' - a figure 8 on its side. Then the heads were aligned so that the shape was symmetrical. Those test disks cost thousands at the time in the 70s. The little alignment tool was a length of 1/8" diameter wire, one end bent to a T shape and the business end had an eccentric pip. Those cost £180. (£821 in today's money). We had lots of little gauges and special tools for those drives and it was all totally useless once the technology had been superseded. The scope we bought cost as much as a decent car and you had to buy everything from the disk manufacturer to maintain approval to work on their products.

By contrast I used to service teletype machines and pretty much everything found a permanent place on the workbench once they were replaced by needle printers. There were really nice sets of spring hooks, nut drivers and super-thin spanners, which I still use today 40 years on.

[Enzo]

Amen. When I first started servicing pinball machines they were mechanical, they went digital in 1976. It was a big box full of relays and stepper units and other mechanical things. We had specialized tools, but mostly regular small hand tools. The guy living across the street was a friend of the boss, and he'd come over. He had a career with NCR, and used to service adding machines and calculators and such office gear. Much if it mechanical then too. He had the best assortment of spring pushers and spring pullers, and other odd fetch and poke tools. Ha came over and gave us a bunch of them. I still keep a couple of the foot long spring tools in my kit. They ar just perfect for reaching through the little holes in the sides of reverb pans, catching the short spring, and fishing it out through the hole to snap in place. Also good for fetching belts over pulleys in dd places.

And yes, I use my sets of small flat wrenches all the time.

Back in the 1970s we took in some computer repairs. I got pretty good on 8" floppy drives. Yes, we had to do all the involved adjusting, eye patterns, and such.

Somewhere I have a test CD for CD players. Old ones also needed to be carefully adjusted for tracking and focus and what not. laborious. Now they adjust themselves.

[tedmich]

All us "old tools" are on our way to obsolescence!

[Enzo]

I know I am for sure. The next generation is taking over. Put me out to stud.

No, really...

[techineer]

The tool of the next generation is likely to be a dumpster. Just about everything built nowadays is so cheap that it can be replaced for less than the value of the time required to repair it.

[Richard]

It's sad that so few things are worth keeping around but It's also a testament to manufacturing that t's cheaper to build than repair. Cars routinely go 200,000+ and don't need a tune up before 70k. I've played $250 guitars that were quite playable.


These were my grandfathers. I took the pictures on my phone and had to shrink them by 50% to upload.

[Drewline]

You have to wonder if "millennials" even know what those tools are & what they were used for. I have some from my father. Used the drafting tools years ago in a dreafting course for my Electronics Technology AA.

[Steve A.]

This is not tool-related but I am still pissed off that the post office took out their coin-operated stamp dispensers. "Too expensive to repair" was what I was told. Damn, at least around here all of the machines were identical so they could have stocked enough parts to keep the machines working for 20 years as a convenience for those people without ATM or credit cards.

Actually I mainly used them to covert my pennies, nickels and dimes into a more convenient form of currency (my quarters were always used when washing clothes... $1.75 wash, 75 cents dry.)

But then again I can't remember the last time I used a postage stamp and I rarely get coins for change anyway. (When I do I keep the quarters and put the rest in the little tip jar next to the cash register.)

I guess times do change!

Steve Ahola

[Enzo]

That pissed me off too. I could buy ONE stamp is I wanted, and using 43 pennies or whatever. Now they have this machine in the lobby, called an APM or something. Has a touch screen and a credit card slot. If you want to buy a stamp, it asks a bunch of questions, then tells you you have to buy at least three stamps because of their dollar minimum charge.

I have a few things I have to mail still. My property taxes require a check. I had one phone company that would not let me pay online unless I went all the way to paperless billing. Sorry, I want my paper invoices for tax time. I no longer have a phone there, so... My Blue Cross comes out of my social security check (direct deposit) except every so often, theit sysatem decides it will start billing me direct again and I have to mail in a check.

And I don;t feel like spending the $8 or whatever it is for a book of stamps.


yep, cheap things aren;t repaired. Ask the guys with those $3000 60 inch TVs if they plan to throw them away when they break. And the $1500 Marshall head. I just paid to have my HP laptop repaired. No one pays to have cheap stuff repaired. Then again, back when everything was repaired, people beefed when I charged them my going labor rate to fix their little practice amp.

[Richard]

It's not so much that they don't make good stuff anymore, they've just figured out how to make stuff cheaply. Now nearly anyone can buy a TV bigger than even existed 30 years ago.

[Richard]

You have to wonder if "millennials" even know what those tools are & what they were used for. I have some from my father. Used the drafting tools years ago in a dreafting course for my Electronics Technology AA.

When I took CAD classes 15 years ago they still required hand drafting for the certificate. Most architects and engineers are fully CAD.

[Steve A.]

When I took CAD classes 15 years ago they still required hand drafting for the certificate. Most architects and engineers are fully CAD.

I had one quarter of drafting when I took Shop Orientation as a HS freshman in 1965. I loved it but my drawings looked very messy as I would always smear the damn graphite all over the page.

I had a friend from church in the late 70's who I ran into doing an HVAC service call in the late 80's. We had all been minimum-wage flunkies back in the day but he had pulled himself up by his bootstraps by teaching himself AutoCAD on his PC. Cool!

Steve Ahola