Analogue Weekend: Part 2
Today I continued to poke around in the Stellaphone ST455. Having got the thing working yesterday, I thought I'd take the back plate off and see whether anything needed attention on the underside. I was greeted by this impressive selection of resistors and capacitors - "Ohm my God!" as we used to chuckle in 'O' Level Physics. I decided not to poke anything in there, I had a couple of teenage close shaves discharging capacitors and I didn't fancy a trip to A&E today.
There are also a couple of lovely old valves on display.
When it's on, these glow, but you'd have to have the thing turned upside down and switched on and I didn't fancy that either today. I'll try and get some pictures of them though, it's a lovely, golden light. No obvious problems detected I gave the cover a wash (it had forty or so years of dust stuck to the grille) and replaced it.
I also checked out the voltage regulator.
So you could set this up to use 110V, 127V, 220V but I thought I'd leave it at 245V :)
Then while I listened to Side 2 of the only tape I have, I took my precision screwdriver to my uncle's old Pentax ME Super (that's an SLR 35mm camera to you, kids). The winder wasn't working and the battery connections were a bit dull. The batteries were easy, a little scratching of the muck off them got the current moving.
The camera can work without batteries, all they do is run the light meter and choose an exposure if it's in AUTO. However even without them I couldn't have used it because the winder just wasn't catching properly. So off with the base plate and time for another poke around.
I couldn't see anything wrong with the mechanism, but I wiped a bit of grime out and gave it the hard blow treatment and then sat and wound it about 100 times, which gets the mechanism going and warms it up after it's not been used for a few years. And now it's good as new (well not really, it's been bashed about a bit) and ready to be loaded up with some FP4 or HP5 (if they still make them...)
I feel completely refreshed and relieved to have had some time mucking around with stuff that doesn't depend on 1s and 0s. Now I really need a shed to put all of this stuff away in and shut myself in over future weekends, doing it on the dining room table means I'm too prone to interruptions!
When I was a kid, i would crack open old and broken gadget (some were new and still worked lol! Got scolded by my parents afterwards😂). Found a similar view, when i was young, I thought the resistors and capacitors were candies with different colors. Tried to remove it and got scolded 😂Thanks for sharing this!
yes, I've had to get over the fear that I'm going to break everything and someone big is going to shout at me! :P
Haha i thot i was the only one with that kind of experience as a child. My dad would really shout at me bacause his hand held radio got broken by me 😂
That sound to be a quite productive weekend, when I saw first time the first two pictures I thought that it is an engine of an old timer with a lot of cylinder and pipes, it is amazing how complicated it looks inside. I would probably just closed it back. Hopefully you enjoyed it :)
haha! yes those resistors do look really huge if you don't know the context :)
I guess that if you had a powerful microscope and could looke at the circuitry of the processing chip of your computer or phone, it would look equally complicated (if not more so).
Yep. Sounds like you definitely need a shed. These are some really great photos. They'd be perfect for some of the contests running here. 😁
Could you really get a bad shock from sticking a screw driver in the back of the tape recorder, if it wasn't plugged in, or were you just being amusing?
it's definitely best to turn it off before you stick a screwdriver in, yes :D
The potential danger is from capacitors, they can hold a charge and you might accidentally discharge it with a screwdriver across the terminals which might not harm you but be a nasty surprise - when we were kids we'd do it for a dare and I saw one person melt a copper-tipped screwdriver. They can also explode and some of them have nasty stuff inside them. It's been so long since I did this stuff seriously (like nearly forty years) that I just wouldn't want to take the risk, especially with old components like this.
Wow .. I really like this thing because there is a friend I also smart in this field ,, but I really do not understand ,, thanks for sharing ,,
actually this stuff can still be used.
and still can be processed into something important.