Shop memories

[Enzo]

I have been going through piles of stuff, trying to clear out some junk. I just found one of my earliest creations - a dummy load.

I grew up in Washington DC, and we had (1950s) a number of surplus outlets, it being not long after world war 2. Plus we had a full line electronics parts company within bicycle distance. I was over there every day buying resistors or tubes or whatever. They used to put out grab bags of stuff for 50 cents or whatever. usually useless, but fun to look through for treasures. And the clearance table. They had a stack of aluminum radio tuner dials. ALuminum sheet about 4.5 x 5.5 inches with a AM radio band printed on it. And a hole bottom center for the tuning cap shaft.

These dial faces were cheap, and by bending down the last inch on either end, it made a handy little U-chassis. I had bought a pile of them, and used them for just everything.

At some point I needed a dummy load for amplifiers. It has three ceramic wirewound 12 ohm resistors wired in parallel standing on end. Maybe 15-20 watts each. I remember taking apart a patch panel or something so I had a big box of those long frame phone jacks. Mounted one of those in the "side" wired to the resistor bank. And I can see my old mind working. I added an RCA jack with a 0.1uf cap to the hot side of the load, so I could monitor the output.

Crude and ugly, but I used to use it a lot. What the heck it was 50 some years ago.


I know there are going to be other memories coming to light as I dig.

[Mick Bailey]

All of the old shops now seem to have gone here in England and the bargains dried up with the advent of the web. Gradually the £1 grab bag of 100 obsolete OC71, OC44, OC81M, AC127, AC128 became £5 for each transistor as the 'mojo' crowd moved in. I've also bought my share of fairly useless (to me) stuff from these places; CATkin triodes, Ex-airforce HT transformers that only worked at 300hz (or whatever), 16v heater TV tubes, circuit boards with DTL logic, tubes with 2v filaments. But you got a great big bag of the stuff for next to nothing. I kept some of the interesting stuff, but guess I'll never use it, though I built a few 2v tube regen radios a couple of years ago from bits I'd saved.

When the ICL computer factory was going nearby there was a lot of surplus - the factory was huge and had regular clearouts. It was pretty exiting stuff, futuristic, as a teenager. Most of it was disposed of to a local scrap dealer who let me trawl through mountains of bagged spares, motors, circuit boards, panels, switches and components. When they finished with a product pretty much everything got cleared. I never got charged a penny, no matter how much I took.

There doesn't seem much of a practical hobby culture with kids any more. It's unusual to find someone with practical skills and an interest in electronics, model making or whatever. There used to be an overwhelming range of magazines to cater for practical hobbies, but the emphasis is on 'consume' rather than 'create'. My modular synth that's taken nearly 4 years to build was greeted with "but why would you bother, I've got one of these on my i-Pad".

Sadly, even if the surplus shops were still there, the grab bags would be too - sitting there like a jug of yesterday's cold gravy. Only those of us with 20 good summers left (or fewer) would be interested. The trouble is, as you get older and more years are behind than in front, it's tempting to take the younger generations on a stroll down the p*ss stained cobbles of memory lane. As a kid once said to me "why are you telling me this - nothing existed before I was born"

They don't get it. I don't either. I'm a refugee from the 60s.

[Mick Bailey]

I saw a pile of old magazines at a car boot a couple of years back, all old radio and TV stuff. The rather elderly woman said they were the last clearout after her husband had died and they used to run a radio shop together, right from the days of exchange accumulators and HT dry battery packs, up to just a few years ago.

In there were some late 60's 'Lafayette' Catalogues, which I bought. What a delight reading through them. We just about got "Tandy" over here in the 70s - our version of "Radio shack". Never saw any Lafayette stuff here in England. I did once get a real find in a Tandy grab bag, though - about a dozen new and carded SN76477 synth chips.

BTW,

Here are some Radio Shack Catalogues on line;

Radio Shack Catalogs - General Catalogs

[Tom Phillips]

Ahhh..Radio Shack. They were never high end but they had some good stuff back in the day and you could pick it up right in the store. I used a lot of their 12" musical instrument speakers. Just this last year I found one of the old boxes from one of those speakers in a closet at my Mom's house. I snapped the attached photo but haven't looked inside that 45+ year old "Memory Box" box yet.
Tom

[Enzo]

Lafayette Radio, oh I used to love getting each new catalog. I'd read through it like a kid with a toy catalog near Xmas. I'd circle things I wanted. Sets of colored clip leads, test equipment, little amplifier kits, parts, short wave radios. Radio Shack eventually blew them away.

I used to like the Allied Radio catalogs too. They made Knight Kits, a direct competition to Heathkit and Eico. They were another alternative to Radio Shack and Lafayette. Over the years, they morphed into Allied Electronics, which still exists today as a competitor to Mouser.

[Tom Phillips]

Cool remembrance Enzo
There was a Lafayette store in my town within easy bicycle distance of my house. I still have a Resist·O·Guide in my resistor cabinet that I got there when I was just learning the color code. Photo attached.

[Enzo]

Oh wow, I forgot those. I have one of those somewhere in a box of stuff. It helped me learn the code in the 1950s.

[Mick Bailey]

When I was a kid I used to visit an old electronics/electrical place. It was in an disused shop in the back streets, a grocer's or something, that had been boarded up with plywood. Everything was piled up high and there was a small 'clearing in the jungle' where the proprietor used to carry out work. He was never too busy to explain something to me or show me how something worked, or why it had gone wrong.

He's sometimes have a bit of a clearout and give me stuff. One day I said I wanted to make a guitar amp. He said "why build one - I've got something you can use" and pulled out a small chassis from a thatch of wires and discarded equipment in a tea chest. He said it was a valve jukebox amp, about 15w and I'd need to build a case and rig it up. He sat down and explained what everything did and I took it home.

I got some scrap flooring chipboard and made a case. For a front panel I got an ex-army catering embossed aluminium tea tray - a kind of beaten finish - and hand sanded it down until it was smooth. Knobs came from an old Vox guitar I found. I painted the case with blackboard paint and proudly got on the bus and went back to show the guy at the store, but it was closed up for good and I never got to show him. I still think about how much time he spent with just a kid with no money. I'd dearly love to get than amp back if it was still out there - somewhere I've got a photo of it.

[Mick Bailey]

Here's that old amp. I was 15 at the time.

[Tom Phillips]

Here's that old amp...

I'd like to see that amp but the photo link is dead. Can you try again?

[Mick Bailey]

Fixed. Don't know what happened there.

[DrGonz78]

That is a nice looking amp there!! I really like the guitar on the right, what is it?

[Mick Bailey]

It started life as a single-humbucker Kay, but I wanted something different so I found a piece of timber (it should have been slightly wider but it was all I had) and transplanted the neck and hardware. The original bridge pickup became the middle pickup, and I put a couple of Vox single coils either side. The contol panel is paxolin.

We didn't have many tools so building anything was a struggle, but the enthusiasm of youth overcomes such obstacles. The body was cut with a piercing saw and the rest of the shaping was done with a spokeshave. It really did sound nice, but the trick was to get the 3 position slide switch just right to select pairs of pickups.

The cutout on the front of the amp was chain-drilled, broken out and sanded to shape (it's a little bit off). It's funny, I remember exactly my thoughts at the time when making it. I wanted the amp to look more busy when I laid it out than it would have been with a single socket, tone and volume controls, so I put the fuseholder and output jack on the front!

[Sowhat]

So much is no longer there it's hard to relay how things were to the younger generations. I virtually lived at the Heathkit store and often would take a journey to Allied Electronics downtown (Chicago) to see what latest Knight or Eico Kit I could get with the pocket change I managed to grub up. All that has evaporated into history leaving very little trace of it's existence except in the memories of old fogies. Where I'm at now (Southern California) there's only 1 electronics store left if you could call it that. In it's heyday that place had everything, piles and piles of everything. There was no need to go any further than Marvac's to get your stuff. Now it has some stuff as long as you like NTE but it's filled with "i stuff" and looks more like a cell phone store than an electronics store. I remember a place here called Orvacs that was so full of stuff that it would make a good episode of Hoarders. You could barely find the aisle for all the boxes of stuff everywhere and great stuff too... Earlier back in my Chicago years the electronics stores were amazing, and they were everywhere, you know, back when every drug store had that glorious RCA tube tester near the front door. So much water under the bridge and unfortunately it don't go to a placid lake where everyone can enjoy the tranquil waters, it's all falls into a black hole. I truly miss how things were and my grandkids will never really know how it was and what they missed.