Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[mnementh]

A few days back, there were some posts about parts storage.   

I use inexpensive "Parkside" organizers from Lidl.   Right now, this week Lidl have these small ones for £3.99 each. 



The large ones were slightly more, but still cheap.   Not currently in UK stores, but maybe they will return.   I bought 3 not knowing if they were any good.  Should have gotten at least 5.




Coilcraft order going into the small box:   I bought direct. Couldn't find an in-stock distributer.

Those look like a SORTIMO clone. SORTIMO's storage ecology is a delight; they have several series of storage boxes of this ilk, and they all fit in a bespoke cabinet like drawers. Of course, like all things that just work, they quickly developed a fanatical following from the likes of Adam Savage, and now they cost like Apple products.

mnem
*living the forever half-sorted life*

[factory]

That style of control knobs disappeared in the mid to late 1950s, metal binding post nuts put it in the early 1950s at least and the wood cases were used into the early 1950s too.
Dating info here, mostly based on 200 series oscillators. https://www.kennethkuhn.com/hpmuseum/dating/vintage_dating.htm
.
.
David

Thanks for a good laugh! When I flew over the page in order to find the last-read post, this sentence gave me a real WTF? moment! OTOH, maybe there is something to build on...although the base needs to be a bit wider than just HP 200 series.
 

The webpage should help with other early HP TE, it gives plenty of clues as to the age, i.e. the style of HP logo, type of terminals & controls etc.
The 200 series would have been choosen as it sold well & plenty survive. Other HP TE, there just isn't enough of them left to do a similar history.

Also check out Ken's webpage if you haven't seen it before and the "Tour of Ken's HP Shop" to see his collection.  https://www.kennethkuhn.com/hpmuseum/

...snip...
One of the guys on the antique radio forum advocates using a pressure washer on really dirty old chassis, says he does it routinely in the summer, then lets them cook dry in the sun for a few days.  He suggested it to me as something to try on an old HP 330B Distortions Analyzer that will otherwise be scrap as it had a large mouse condo in it and is rather skeevy and corroded inside.  I never got to it this past summer, but may this year.  At this point I've nothing to lose as far as it goes on this piece.



-Pat

I think I'd just admit defeat on that one and donate it to the zoo as enrichment for the rodent exhibit...

I figure it's a good guinea pig to try extreme cleaning techniques on, seeing as it's so far gone at this point there's really nothing to lose, and it is a cool old piece of gear if I can fix it - it's pre-1960 based on the serial number.

-Pat

The shape of the meter bezel says that, too---I would say 1940s!

They used that type of meter well into the late 1950's, when the knobs changed to the classic HP type they used throughout the 1960s.

David

[Andrew_Debbie]

Those look like a SORTIMO clone. SORTIMO's storage ecology is a delight; they have several series of storage boxes of this ilk, and they all fit in a bespoke cabinet like drawers. Of course, like all things that just work, they quickly developed a fanatical following from the likes of Adam Savage, and now they cost like Apple products.

mnem
*living the forever half-sorted life*

 The large Lidl ones are made in Germany.  There is a small chance SORTIMO made them for Lidl.  At that price it is more likely they are clones.    The little boxes are marked OWIM GMBH & Co.    OWIM looks to be a six employee shell owned by Lidl, so

[Zucca]

You want to suffer, or you want the job done, Xilinx clearly states on which distribution their tools runs, install Ubuntu.

Well

I will give it a try.

[mansaxel]

A thing of beauty when used to deliberately make conical holes, a horror when used to make holes that ought to be cylindrical by their nature.

Yes, I understand your point. There is one built to do just those 12,7mm holes in finished expensive guitars:



The problem is that it's expensive enough that I'm considering a combination of a conical reamer that ends up with 12,7mm as its major diameter and a standard issue cylindrical 12,7mm spiral drill.

This little babe  <snip>

Oooooh. I want one. I don't need one, but I want one.

There's something very unnerving about taking a 1/2" drill bit to the bottom of a mostly finished guitar. Taking one to a completely finished guitar would be nail biting. Definitely the kind of job that you spend a couple of days rehearsing inside your head before eventually going for it.

Yes, exactly this. That's why I'm thinking about the reamer, because it will, or so I'm told, cut properly without disturbing the finish. And then I can follow up with a normal drill.  There are luthier videos on the Tube showing this exact technique.

[Cerebus]

Yes, exactly this. That's why I'm thinking about the reamer, because it will, or so I'm told, cut properly without disturbing the finish. And then I can follow up with a normal drill.  There are luthier videos on the Tube showing this exact technique.

Exactly why I suggest a lip and spur drill. On a good sharp one the lip/spurs actually cut the finish and the wood before the crude bit of the drill gets anywhere near it. No chipping the varnish, no tear-out in the wood. An alternative might be a classic engineering cylindrical reamer, but I'd want to try it out on some scrap first - cutting angles for wood can be very different from typical engineering materials.

If you want I can dig around and see if I've got any scraps of guitar side wood around. I tend to keep offcuts so I ought to have some, most likely mahogany. If I have them you're welcome to them as practice pieces. It will mean digging under the bed for the guitar wood box, and that means facing the dread bust bunnies of doom.

[Cubdriver]

Yes, exactly this. That's why I'm thinking about the reamer, because it will, or so I'm told, cut properly without disturbing the finish. And then I can follow up with a normal drill.  There are luthier videos on the Tube showing this exact technique.

Exactly why I suggest a lip and spur drill. On a good sharp one the lip/spurs actually cut the finish and the wood before the crude bit of the drill gets anywhere near it. No chipping the varnish, no tear-out in the wood. An alternative might be a classic engineering cylindrical reamer, but I'd want to try it out on some scrap first - cutting angles for wood can be very different from typical engineering materials.

If you want I can dig around and see if I've got any scraps of guitar side wood around. I tend to keep offcuts so I ought to have some, most likely mahogany. If I have them you're welcome to them as practice pieces. It will mean digging under the bed for the guitar wood box, and that means facing the dread bust bunnies of doom.

-Pat

[mnementh]

   Of course, I still have these rather disreputable-looking examples...

A hand reamer is a thing of beauty. I really should get one, up to 12,7mm would do nicely.  I have this little project with an acoustic guitar, that needs a pickup. The noveau-classique way to fit the phone jack is to replace the shoulder strap knob on the body with a special 1/4" jack that not only serves as output but also as knob. (The phone jack also serves as power switch to the preamp in the pickup, if it's active. Shorting ring and sleeve grounds the battery circuit and powers the preamp.)

A thing of beauty when used to deliberately make conical holes, a horror when used to make holes that ought to be cylindrical by their nature...

Agreed in principle... in practice, it doesn't amount to squat in most metal or plastic facepanel-fabbing applications the tapered reamer is meant for. I've used them on panels as much as 4ish mm thick; yes, the taper is noticeable. The trick is to finish sizing the hole from the back so that the minor diameter is on the face side rather than the back.

The nice thing is that it is much safer than almost any other method for working on finished panels; a sharp one will cut clean with nearly zero burr, meaning the chances of scratching the face while deburring are minimized.

Another tactic is to cut almost to finished size from the back, then the last half-turn or so from the front; this removes any burr safely while making the hole such that there are two tapered faces. This technique works especially nicely for certain grommets and indicator lights that tend to hang up on even the slightest bit of burr.

mnem
*tinker-ily*

[mnementh]

Those look like a SORTIMO clone. SORTIMO's storage ecology is a delight; they have several series of storage boxes of this ilk, and they all fit in a bespoke cabinet like drawers. Of course, like all things that just work, they quickly developed a fanatical following from the likes of Adam Savage, and now they cost like Apple products.

mnem
*living the forever half-sorted life*

 The large Lidl ones are made in Germany.  There is a small chance SORTIMO made them for Lidl.  At that price it is more likely they are clones.    The little boxes are marked OWIM GMBH & Co.    OWIM looks to be a six employee shell owned by Lidl, so

Company Description: OWIM GmbH & Co. KG is located in Neckarsulm, Baden-Württemberg, Germany and is part of the Freight Transportation Arrangement Industry. OWIM GmbH & Co. KG has 8 employees at this location and generates $4.13 billion in sales (USD). (Sales figure is estimated). There are 4,294 companies in the OWIM GmbH & Co. KG corporate family.

mnem

[mnementh]

When I touch a topic in the naive expectation to come to a solution today and build it, let's say, next week, I should be forewarned. Whether actual paid work is involved does not seem to be the driver here - disaster is impending.
After the story of the GPS receiver signal booster (about 2 years ago), I found time to do some measurements on the interface cable with the aim of replacing the coupled lengths of actual cable with a nice little dummy cable box.
Then I saw what makes up the model of a multiple wire shielded cable.
 
Even partial solutions seem to involve complex matrices of parameters. The measurement gives some rather straightforward data, like capacitance from a conductor against its neighbours, against the shield and against a conductor at a position across the cable. And here starts the crap. Is the capacitance across the cable real or is it made up by the various capacitances towards neighbouring conductors and the screen, and those of the neighbouring conductors as well as the one's across the cable towards the screen?
Maybe I should hit the reset button now and stay with the multiple 10m cables. Until now, I luckily told no one to expect such a box. 

No matter your level of skill, knowledge or experience, a project will expand to test your patience and analytical abilities. While you are trying to integrate the matrices of capacitance, inductance, impedance etc etc for your dummy cable box, somebody somewhere is pulling out their hair trying to make a blinky work...

BASTARD! How did you know what I had on my bench...? 

mnem
"Daddy, fix please..." ~ Famous Last Words

[mnementh]

...If you want I can dig around and see if I've got any scraps of guitar side wood around. I tend to keep offcuts so I ought to have some, most likely mahogany. If I have them you're welcome to them as practice pieces. It will mean digging under the bed for the guitar wood box, and that means facing the dread bust bunnies of doom.

mnem
 

[Specmaster]

Meanwhile, in other news, my youngest son has just brought the Ghostbusters trilogy, and we watched them all, if anyone is a fan of them, I can recommend the latest film, Ghostbusters Afterlife, it is pretty good 

TEA related, these IC probes I ordered from Aliexpress have arrived and they certainly work ok, I have just ordered the 1 mm female dupont to 4 mm banana plug in order to connect them to a DMM for reading purposes, something I forgot to do at the time of ordering the probes 

[mnementh]

Just watched the trailer and Heh...! I had that car, even that same maroon 2-tone color; literally drove the wheels off it, and usually doing exactly this.  4bbl 390, FMX 3-speed. First car with an automatic I actually enjoyed driving.

mnem

[mnementh]

Used the MetCal in anger today... nothing awesome; just soldered a couple lap-joints to make some speaker wires longer. But it felt good.   

mnem

[Cerebus]

Got me new drill bits and I've finally been able to make some chips. Lordy, the alloy that Hammond is using nowadays is really gummy. I've even been having to scrape bits off the edge of my Noga deburring tool. Weirdly it files really nicely and doesn't gum up the files. Normally when taking a file to aluminium I'm reaching for the file card every three minutes, but not today. Well, I've got much more filing than drilling to do so I shouldn't complain. But die casting alloys are always a bit weird, they care more about shrinkage and clean quick freezing then cutting properties. Out of shear (sic) curiosity I'll have to see if they specify the alloy they're using.

You can see from the ragged edges of these chips that they're not exactly what you'd call exemplary.



OK, they're not terrible, but they're not exactly good either.

Oh yes, my nibbler's gone walkabout, so filing really is the name of the game today.

Anyway 1 1/2 rectangular holes left to do and then I'm finished. Got the worst one for the IEC connector out of the way, which is nice. Two corners of the mains switch and the complete voltage selector left to file. Ho hum, back into the fray...

Edit: Seems to be LM2M alloy (Al-Si10Cu2).

[cyclin_al]

I got a new Keithley brown box recently. Keithley 617 electrometer. I don't really need it but have a soft spot for electrometers. It's coming from our federal government auction site.



[other photos snipped]

In the end I was lucky, the meter is working fine and I didn't paid that much.

Nice score!

Did you buy the whole lot, or did you find that at a surplus shop?
I am assuming that I saw the same listing, but the whole lot was a full skid of gear.  There were several pieces that I was quite interested in.
However, the bidding for the lot went well beyond (by orders of magnitude) the money I could justify for one or two pieces.

[Kosmic]

I got a new Keithley brown box recently. Keithley 617 electrometer. I don't really need it but have a soft spot for electrometers. It's coming from our federal government auction site.



[other photos snipped]

In the end I was lucky, the meter is working fine and I didn't paid that much.

Nice score!

Did you buy the whole lot, or did you find that at a surplus shop?
I am assuming that I saw the same listing, but the whole lot was a full skid of gear.  There were several pieces that I was quite interested in.
However, the bidding for the lot went well beyond (by orders of magnitude) the money I could justify for one or two pieces.

The listing was just for the Keithley 617. That was some times ago. The recent lots went for crazy money. I'm not paying 2K$ for bunch of broken TE.

[cyclin_al]

I got a new Keithley brown box recently. Keithley 617 electrometer. I don't really need it but have a soft spot for electrometers. It's coming from our federal government auction site.



[other photos snipped]

In the end I was lucky, the meter is working fine and I didn't paid that much.

Nice score!

Did you buy the whole lot, or did you find that at a surplus shop?
I am assuming that I saw the same listing, but the whole lot was a full skid of gear.  There were several pieces that I was quite interested in.
However, the bidding for the lot went well beyond (by orders of magnitude) the money I could justify for one or two pieces.

The listing was just for the Keithley 617. That was some times ago. The recent lots went for crazy money. I'm not paying 2K$ for bunch of broken TE.

except the lot went for 5.2k$ ... 
Beyond my pay scale even if it was guaranteed in working order...

[Brumby]

Oh yes, my nibbler's gone walkabout...

Yeah ... my nibbler went walkabout too.  Haven't seen it in over 20 years.   

(Haven't needed it for 25  )

[TERRA Operative]

TDS620B reassembly day today, then off to the Toyota dealership for quotes on repairing the altercation I was an unwilling participant of the other day.

A combination of dishwasher, scrubbing brush, and isopropyl alcohol has this thing looking fantastic from what it was, it still has a very faint smell of cigarettes, but only really on the rubber parts so it should fade in time I hope.
Once it's reassembled, I'll get it working (PSU problems so far) then once it's all up an running, I plan to have a bit of fun upgrading it to a TDS684B, just because I want to tinker.

I'll post before and after picture once it's reassembled. Now I just need some thermal paste....

[Saskia]

&%$%&$ Linux.

What do you think about Arch Linux?
It seems a good horse to me.

You want to suffer, or you want the job done, Xilinx clearly states on which distribution their tools runs, install Ubuntu.

company policy forces me to install Red hat. even though I don't have to like it.

[DC1MC]

You want to suffer, or you want the job done, Xilinx clearly states on which distribution their tools runs, install Ubuntu.

Well

I will give it a try.

Companies want reproducible results, that is: install distribution, install tolls, go, no other tweaking needed.
In case of issues the tech support always starts "What distribution/version you're using ?", and if you start mumbling "...ummmh yes, Makumba Linux rolling versin compiled from sources, see, they have a wiki where they say it mostly works after some hacking..." you'll hear the line closed tone immediately or see "ticket closed".
In companies is either Ubuntu/Debian or RedHat/Centos and that's it.

[Specmaster]

<snip>
Oh yes, my nibbler's gone walkabout, so filing really is the name of the game today.

Perhaps it's taken a stroll to McDonalds for a quick nibble 

[Specmaster]

Oh yes, my nibbler's gone walkabout...

Yeah ... my nibbler went walkabout too.  Haven't seen it in over 20 years.   

(Haven't needed it for 25  )

What is it with nibblers going AWOL, you need to feed them once in a while 

[Atomillo]

Surprise eBay buy time!

Just bought this for 28 euros delivered. The seller was advertising it as DC Amplifier. The vernier looks like some scope Y amplifier and the sticker also seems to point to that, but then why doesn't it use a BNC jack in the input??

The only reason I bought it is for the 0.5mV/cm range. If it is actually a DC Amplifier it will be interesting to see how they handle that.

Anyone knows what this box actually is?