Finally, a couple of weeks ago I was going to bid on an item when the auction was shown as being in Aylesbury. Then it "moved" to Scotland, and it wasn't worth a 700 mile trek. I bid on something similar a couple of weeks ago, but it went for £95. But at Kempton I saw the first item; the vendor had indeed gone to Scotland and filled up a van with many of the items from a college that was shutting down.
Anyway, I am now the proud possessor of a Griffin Timer Scaler containing some of the same technology used in the world's oldest operating computer, the WITCH in TNMoC. Yes, it does work, and looks as retro cute as I would hope
Since pictures are required, here's one at 1/250s:
And I still haven't got the blasted handle off!
I guess the £95 one was the Advance Counter-Timer SC1, it was on my watch list to just to see how much it would make and to save the pictures later.
This one was bought one years ago for about £24;
A replacement dekatron needed for it cost more than the unit (the Argon had escaped), I seem to remember the voltage selector was missing and the mains lead had been cropped off too.
Here are some pictures of the insides;
Sadly service manuals for Advance stuff are pretty hard to find, I've never found anything for the SC1, maybe I'll have to go through it component by component one day to find out why it only counts with low mains/line voltage (i.e. with the lamp limiter in circuit).
David