- 2024
- Apr
- 25
Stuff I brought home from Cuyahoga Falls 2024.
I did it again. Too much stuff, but I’m going to blame some of the sellers for being so congenial about negotiating on prices! (Yah right!)
So, what did I bring home this year?
Fuses.
This vendor had a lot of different values, including a lot of fractionals that will cost you a small fortune if you buy them new, so I picked up some 1/3, 1/4, 15mA, and 1A varieties. What’s kind of cool about these things is Seneca Fuse used to be a Columbus, OH corporation, and one of the boxes is marked as such. The company was purchased by an entity called Russell Enterprises, which appears to have long since gone out of business.
This is a cool little device that didn’t cost much. It’s a primitive hypot-type device that can test for leakage in a circuit. While primarily designed for appliances and other large current consuming things of yesterday, it still works great as a bench voltage monitor. It also performs it’s other functions without issue, so it was a good find - and it had the manual with it. I’m not sure what the leads were for, this device used EICO’s pin plugs. No worries, another set of leads on the bench is always a good thing!
I actually only wanted the AC Voltmeter in this lot, but the seller was really good on the price for all three, so I came home with the AC Voltmeter, a current meter, and the oddball Sanwa transistor checker. The meters are nice dampened movements and work well, but I haven’t installed batteries in the tester to see if it works. Not sure I will, those little handheld device checkers do an excellent job of sorting parts and identifying things for you.
This little meter in a case was probably part of some course offered by NRI Schools, an early “distance learning” company. (Started in 1914 as National Radio Schools, ended in 1999 as NRI - changing tides on the electronics landscape did them in.) While it’s not really of much use, the real Mueller copper clips and other test leads were well worth the price of $3. The device itself sat in a basement for some time, and it smells like it - if I can get the smell to fade, perhaps I’ll find a use for it.
Here’s the odds ‘n ends portion of the program. An apparently new Ford AM radio that I got for a put-in-the-rack project, a B&K Precision LED voltmeter that matches my capacitor checker, and a surprisingly well written TAB book about early microprocessors. I say “well written” because TAB would publish almost anything. Some books were pretty good, but some were literally nothing more than a guy who wrote a book about taping LEDs to various things and called it “101 electronics projects.”
I don’t need more of these, but they were a good price for functional units, and they’re starting to get outrageously priced. These were checked for operation, and will go into storage as parts donors - or perhaps as resale units once cleaned up and re-capped. Who knows?
In all, it was a good show. I didn’t need to drag home some of that stuff, but I did. I’ll see you at the next show this weekend!