New acquisition:
EICO 667 vacuum tube tester. I got it off of the bay of evil.
I've been buying a good amount of hollow state noise-makers (Hammond organ, Leslie, guitar amps, etc) recently and I've got a wide variety of tubes types now, some potentially valuable. I figured it would be good to have an easy way to test these. Of course, this follows the typical TEA path of: "You need to test a thing. You buy a vintage thing-tester. Now you've got two problems."
It was sold as "for parts..." as much TE is. I sprayed a lot of DeoxIT on it and put little dots of oil here and there. I tested a few cheap tubes on it and it seems to work OK. The tube roll-chart looks clean and functions well. Fixing busted roll-charts is supposed to be a bear. The 667 chart is known to have mistakes and omissions, so I'll have to download one of the crowdsourced charts. This unit looks completely stock. I plan on replacing all of the carbon resistors and "Murphy's footsoldiers" (caps) before trying to use it in anger. There are some modifications that various folks have done (adding protection diodes and banana jacks to measure current, etc.) I will probably do some of that. I'll look into the possibility of adding an IEC power input. Calibration is easy and only requires fiddling with two pots in the guts. I think that some 667s were sold as kits, and that others were factory-built. Mine looks more "factory" to me.
Here's a page with a little info on the 667 (and other EICO products). Apparently it was USD89 for a new one in 1970.
https://www.nostalgickitscentral.com/eico/products/test_tt.html--------------
My family enjoys seeing steam trains and hydro-power installations. Well, I like dams and the duckling likes trains and my wife puts up with us. We stopped by the Grand Coulee Dam and I saw a beautiful General Electric watt meter from the 1940's in the museum / visitor's center. I wish I took a better picture of it now, but what can you do?
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I recently found out about "fiberglass erasers". These are "pens" with fiberglass in them. The fiberglass breaks off as you use it, so it is always "sharp". The fiberglass can be advanced/retracted by turning the end of the pen. The pens can be purchased for a couple of bucks each from the usual scumbags. These pens are magic for cleaning corroded little things. The brass electrical plug was brown from 40 years of oxidation. The "pencil eraser trick" didn't work very well at all. A few seconds with the fiberglass eraser and the plug contacts were bright again. N.B. that these pens make lots of sub-1mm glass "fuzz-bits" when you use them, so do it outside, or have a shop-vac handy. Also great for removing rust from screw threads or hand tools. It definitely will mess up the metal's patina, so you need to be careful about what you use them on, but it's a nice to have some in your toolbox.
EDIT:
Yes, the EICO 667 also tests transistors, but I don't have much use for that. I already have one of those inexpensive clone "transistor testers".
EDIT EDIT:
Old phone numbers in the USA were 5 digits, prepended by a couple of letters. That's before my time.
EDIT EDIT EDIT:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Coulee_DamEDIT^4:
A retro-reply - when I was a PC repair tech decades ago, we had to buy our own tools. I spent a relatively large amount of money (for a lowly tech) and bought high-quality Craftsman brand (made in USA back then) tools. I have them all to this day and they are used regularly.