This device is a complete mess, and everything needs to go. Since it’s all coming out, let’s pull the function switch and clean it. I started with a good deoxit dousing, and then a gentle brushing to loosen some of the crap. Then, into the bath it goes!
It came out decent enough.
After cleaning, it was sprayed with alcohol to displace the water, allowed to dry, then re-coated with cleaner and grease for the detents.
Next thing to do was pull the other pots.
These were just bad. I cleaned them and they still were difficult to turn - one was simply locked up.
The switch was reinstalled:
New pots were installed in the chassis. One is a 2MΩ pot, for some reason. The rest are “Those are totally real Bourns, Bro!” pots.
And, of course, just removing more of the snot-covered wire from the chassis.
Next up is the range switch, the pots on the face, and the rest of the wire. Stay tuned!
The annual fall swap meet and auction happened at the Early Television Museum in Hilliard, Ohio over the past weekend (October 17th.) This isn’t a hamfest, but it is a high-quality, small show where television collectors from all over come to chat and pick up new pieces. I saw trucks from Alaska here, if that says anything.
I took a few small things home, but for the most part what’s here is eye candy for me. I almost took an Hallicrafters electrostatic set home…almost. What would I do with it? Fortunately, a collector picked it up first.
Here’s what I saw in the outdoor swap section. This was all vendors coming in - it’s free to set up and attend.
Some B&W televisions blanking in the light.
Electrostatic Television.
More Electrostatic Television.
Emerson Television.
It's free!
Just like gramma had in the spare room.
It almost went home with me.
It's unusual to find these intact.
New CRTs, still in the box.
Parts is parts.
Can you smell the decaying plastic?
A floor model for your tabletop.
Every television needs a clippership.
A shango special.
Just a bunch of sets.
Surprise, more televisions!
I like the lamp at the top.
There’s another part to this show, and that’s the auction. It’s inside the warehouse, which in itself is a treasure trove of early television. While not all of what is in the following pictures was in the auction, almost all of it is for sale - if you see something interesting, please feel free to call them about it. I’ve always found their prices are reasonable for what the item is, but also they’re what the item is worth. I don’t have anything to say about these pictures, just enjoy!
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There’s one more hamfest I’ll attend this year in Canton, Ohio. Stay tuned!
Zenith got quite innovative in their later years - their televisions went modular for serviceability. The tech could have a bunch of modules in a case, come out, diagnose and have your TV up and running again in a half-hour as opposed to dragging it back to the shop or pulling chassis units out.
This is a Zenith Low-Level Luminance Module, part number 9-88-03.
The board itself is interesting. 1978 - but it’s got an integrated circuit…
…and a special Zenith device. The modern couplet.
The back, of course, is wave soldered and belies that “quickerer is betterer” mentality that invaded television by this time. The flux is real on this thing.
Of course, the interesting thing is the marking.
There it is. The orange “T,” indicating the raw board was made in Coshocton, Ohio at the GE plant. This stuff was everywhere at one time.
I’ve been doing some YouTube stuff for a while now, most of that showing up on https://youtube.com/ … bottomdrawerprojects. I played around with a few concepts, including scheduled release dates, and a second channel that started to collect all of the build videos - https://youtube.com/@boaringboarbuilds - but I don’t know that it is working as well as I wanted.
This isn’t about numbers, what I’m running into is that videos I make on a device are quickly becoming scheduled for a long time after the device has finished up it’s repairs here at Projects, and by the time it finally does show up it’s forgotten. I want to try and make a “here’s the device, here’s a video” type system so you can see what’s going on. That, to me at least, seems like it would be more interesting than having a video show up a year from now and needing to dig around to find the accompanying information here at Projects.
What I’m going to do is start releasing videos @bottomdrawerprojects a handful at a time as not to overwhelm the connectors I have set up to odysee.com. When those are done, videos @boaringboarbuilds will be moved over. When everything is all released and moved, new videos will be posted as they happen.
Boaring Boar Builds will be moved to a kits and new stuff builds channel, and all of the old stuff will stay at Bottom Drawer Projects. There will still be some scheduled releases, shorts and holiday things, but for the most part everything will release in real time.
Thank you for all the views and visits here to projects, and I hope you’ve found something of interest.
I’ve decided to start on the “second” Precise 9071 as the first teardown and rebuild candidate. While there’s not much to show about the actual teardown itself, I did find it interesting that this unit had a couple of no-solders.
I wonder how many issues this caused over the years.
The rest was just removing parts and doing cleanup. I was going to try and re-use the wire that was already there, but…it’s so sticky that I didn’t want to use it.
Some of the wires are literally coated with decayed plastic snot.
I ended up with a pile of parts removed:
…and a chassis that looks just as bad as when I started.
Next up is removing the range switch and dropping it in the ultrasonic bath. Stay tuned!
I’ve had a couple of these devices sitting around for a while in various conditions, but all of them had meters that weren’t in the best of conditions. When I saw this one show up online for a reasonable price, I grabbed it. While I knew it had some minor case damage, the meter face itself was in great shape, and it seemed pretty clean. There was a reason for that…
This is a unit that offers everything audio. Load resistors, AC VTVM, I/M analyzer, etc. Kind of a test bench inna box thing.
Let’s check out the unit itself before digging into the chassis.
Here’s the front of the unit with the clear meter cover.
Here’s the smashed corner. It’s not terribly bad.
Of course, a friend of mine “fixed” it for me.
The back is nothing special, but it has a replacement cord. That’s nothing unusual for a device this old.
The top and side, of course, exhibit the standard Heathkit pull-apart that you get with these big boxes that have no screws near the top.
Let’s open the device. Here’s the inside. The screw that holds that coil down is loose, but we can fix that later.
Here’s all the load resistors. They’re all intact and close to their values.
Here’s where things get interesting. This is a brand-spankin’ new capacitor…
The switches have been cleaned…these are normally black with oxidation.
Let’s take a look at the underside of the chassis.
This thing has been almost completely reworked underneath, even to the safety capacitor, which is of the correct type.
There’s some minor messes, like this set of capacitors. There’s nothing wrong with this, and it’s acceptable to get parts up to a higher voltage.
The only real issues I see here are minor.
Those are old capacitors. They probably shouldn’t be in there, but depending on where they are in the circuit it may not have mattered. If they’re low voltage, then they’re probably fine…but there’s no need to leave them in when new stuff is so cheap. There’s a handful of these in the unit.
This one is an actual problem:
That resistor, one of the many precisions in the device, is broken. I can see where the previous owner tried to fix it, but it just popped off with a minor touch. I can understand why this was done, those are bespoke parts. You can make them from combining standard values, so that’s probably what I’ll do.
I did try it out briefly, the meter moves but it’s not zero’d, which means there’s still some leakers in there. That will be corrected during some rework. In the meantime, I have a second unit that has a good faceplate, so I’ll probably swap the chassis in that one out for this chassis, and go from there. Stay tuned!
Cleveland has been a good show for me for as long as I’ve been going. While the inside building they have ebbs and flows with vendors, the outdoor flea market was well stocked with things we’d expect to see at shows. Tables of radios, piles of equipment - all the good stuff.
I didn’t take much home from this one, as I had to stop myself from buying yet more boat anchors. I went home with some tools, a power strip, and an old handheld game. I got away lucky!
I did see some other things I was interested in, but a few of the vendors here (and all shows, TBH,) seem to treat their prices as a state secret. I don’t want to have to flag you down and have you hmmmmm and hawww for a minute while you try and gauge how much I might pay you, mark your prices! I passed up a couple of interesting things for this reason.
Other than that, here’s what I saw at the show:
Rat Shack will be with us forever.
Old consumer gear.
A 1970s WE butt set.
An unusual Conar (NRI) scope.
A Heathkit distortion analyzer.
Guaranteed defective.
I think this has eleven tubes.
A table full of unpriced equipment.
One of those old VFD card games. I took it home.
An excellent condition old HP signgen.
A Heathkit power inverter. 25A input!
I don't need another VOM.
This device is in it's home town.
This tube devices power supply.
Surprise, radios!
Some Heathkit meters.
There are at least 2.61 of these monitor scopes for every person on Earth.
You guessed it, radios!
This is a nice-looking radio.
We come to shows for piles of junk.
We have the power!
Got a line voltage? Measure it here!
When it needs to be soldered.
Just stuff.
More stuff. We like stuff.
A Zenith Trans-Oceanic in decent enough shape.
I always pick up a few things from here.
This isn't far from home.
Vu-Data made scopes for data centers.
This interestingly strange radio.
Wire recorders are still fairly common.
Next show is the Early Television Museum’s fall swap, and the last one I’ll hit this year is probably MARC @ MAPS. See you there!
There are four more capacitors in the EICO 242 I’d like to replace before doing a calibration on it. Those are:
The main AC filter,
The two capacitors in the AC rectifier circuit,
The main AC input blocking capacitors.
There’s not much else to say, let’s get started.
First is the AC blocking capacitor. It’s a hefty part, 0.1 @ 1600VDC. I have some new 2KV parts for this.
This one was kind of a pain in the butt to get out without messing up other wires.
Next is the main filter. This was a matter of unbolting the board, unsoldering the capacitor, and replacing it. Not really that bad. It’s not defective, but it’s 50. Let’s get it out of there.
The old part is a 300μF @ 30V. I have 470μF at 50V. Now, this device has that as well. The old part was closer to 400μF, so we’re not far off from the new one at 460μF measured.
The last part(s) are the capacitors in the AC rectifier circuit. There are two, both 0.027μF ceramics. There’s also some diodes that I had to heat up to remove the capacitor.
Those diodes look like crap. I’ll re-do those at a later date.
Next up is the calibration. There are a few resistors in there that are off, so it’s not going to be 100% across all ranges. We’ll get to that at a later date. Stay tuned!
I went to the Findlay hamfest this past weekend instead of the Clearfield hamfest - I wanted to go to the latter, but something got in the way and I went local instead.
Unfortunately, Findlay has shrank substantially over the years. Last year was probably 1/3 of the year before, and this year maybe 1/2 of last year. I’m sad to see that happen, and it makes me wonder if it’s because the club is aging out, because there are more shows, or simply the changing fortunes of time. Probably a some of each, but it was quite small this year with a lot of open space. We used to shut the show down at 1PM, but headed out at about 9:30 for this one.
There was a bit to look at, but I had to struggle to find interesting things to photograph. Here’s a few things for you, some of these I know have showed up in the past.
Keeping the ground from blowing away.
A nice old Schauer battery charger.
These are getting rarer
An interesting VTVM.
Meters. All kinds.
Piles of junk. Hamfest gold.
I see these here quite often.
All the bearcats you need.
Next show is Cleveland, which has been pretty good so far, after that the Early Television Museum’s swap meet and I’ll probably close the year out with MARC @ MAPS and the antique show at the fairgrounds. Stay tuned!
