Memories of electronics..

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Joined 2010
germanium xsistors could get blown if you handled them wrong - similar to blowing the old FET's with just the static from moving your body around and have a charge on it. :mad:

I loved it when the silicon xsistors came around!!!!

I remember the AF117 <<think it was..went open circuit... if you tapped it with a screwdriver it would work again for a few seconds. It had a screen which made it difficult to substitute...we did have a silicon replacment but I can't remember what it was..:)

Regards
M. Gregg
 
The crystal set...........when I was very young....I marveled how delicate, how watch innards that tuner looked, those tiny stack of plates moving within that plastic thing the size of a flattened sugar cube. Many a component got dis-assembled without someone knowing about it. "What's wrong with the radio now!" Glowing tubes....6.3V bayonet lamps...a yellow glow.
Then on to ITT where I learned all about loads of fascinating stuff.

__________________________________________________________________Rick....
 
My world of electricity was opened when the paper clip met the wall outlet at age 5. I was impressed by the fireworks, but my father was not impressed with the black spot on the wall. I took all sorts of elecrtical and mechanical things apart from an early age but was forbidden to play with the wall outlet any more.:(

Was this the one with a perforated chassis and you pushed the spring retainer through the holes with a spring on the other side.. you depressed the spring to put the component legs in?

Sometime around age 9 or 10 my father got me an electronics kit with spring thingies similar to the Philips kit. This kit was made by GE, contained 5 black germanium transistors (2N107's) and a funky speaker that was high impedance and center tapped. There was a large plastic form on which you wound a rotatable loop antenna for AM broadcast reception. The "board" was a piece of white pegboard with hundreds of holes on a 1 inch grid. There was a book of maybe 100 projects from a 1 transistor regerative radio to a 5 transistor superhet with push pull audio. Each project began with a bingo callout of where to put the spring thingies. It ran on bateries so I could play with it unsupervised. :)

Those little germanium fuses couldn't be that easy to kill because I had that kit for several years, did every one of the projects several times, and even made up a few of my own. By this time I had an electric guitar, but no amp. I made a little amp with the kit, but it wasn't loud.:(

Somewhere about age 10 my parents decided to toss their Magnavox tube HiFi in favor of a solid state Silvertone stereo. I got the old HiFi but only had one 45 RPM record. One day I got the brilliant idea to cut a guitar cord in half and twist the wires to the wires in the tone arm in the Magnavox. The second magic moment in electricity occurs. It ROCKS.....a carreer is born!

It was only a year or two until I was making guitar amps from parts salvaged from old TV sets.

Heathkit were very good...

The old guy living next door had bought a Heathkit AR-13 solid state receiver kit. He was a quack doctor with a reputation as a strange dude, but he did woodworking and made some DIY Klipshorns. He got about halfway through the Heathkit build and gave up. He asked my father if he could pay me to build it. I was about 12 so my father declined. When my dad wasn't home, I built the guys Heathkit. He showed me how to make speaker cabinets and gave me his old tube stereo.

a crystal radio set in high school electronics class....

Against the objections of my parents I got into a vocational electronics program in high school. It was 3 years long. The first year was 1 hour per day, the last two years were 3 hours per day. There was theory stuff from textbooks. Mostly Army books covering vacuum tubes, but some modern solid state stuff in Philco books. Most of the hands on stuff was tubes. Homestead Air Force base had donated thousands of tubes and parts to the school and there were hundreds of metal 6L6's. Did I make guitar amps? Can you make the outside metal envelope of a 6L6 glow red? Would you bet against a teenage Tubelab armed with several Eico power supplies and a really BIG variac? The teacher did, and he lost! High school saw me break the 200 watt barrier in a tube amp (8 metal 6L6's) and 300 watts with silicon (8 2N3055's). Two years after HS graduation (1970) I made 1200 audio watts with 24 2N3773's (military power inverter repurposed) a power level that I have not seen since.
 
My world of electricity was opened when the paper clip met the wall outlet at age 5. I was impressed by the fireworks, but my father was not impressed with the black spot on the wall. I took all sorts of elecrtical and mechanical things apart from an early age but was forbidden to play with the wall outlet any more.:(

Well, you were smarter than me.:D

At that age I did something worse, I took courage and put my finger on one of the terminals, and nothing happened, confident touched the other end ...since then I have much respect for 220V.:wave2s:

I clarify that until recently, manufacturers, in a criminal act, did the cable sockets with terminals uncovered !!!:mad:
 
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Anything that stopped working,

was placed on one side for me to strip for parts..even old Irons...
The first stereo was built from two old record players (Tube SE N78.. OP tubes "marconi") into a wooden box, speakers were also from the record players built into boxes.

I don't know why but the power Tx fascinated me with the tar like substance all over it...It only ever got warm to the touch..We get fobbed off now with "this Tx is designed to run at 110 Deg C"..a slight hum may be apparent..:D

Regards
M. Gregg
 
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Joined 2010
While doing a training course (1976) at Thorn automation, (Star Drives)


I built the practical wireless simple clock..I had access to etching facilities..:D I had been looking at it for ages and decided to stop looking and do it..

Mag cover:


Regards
M. Gregg
 

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It's clear I'm still just kid.
My first project was QUAD-405.
I put it together and it worked.

The oscilloscopes are always fascinated me.
I have three oscilloscopes.
So what?
My wife has three, not three, but four sewing machines!
These are much noisier.
And she got from me two sewing machines.
Do not ask, how many oscilloscopes I got from her.
 
I started from flashlights, batteries, switches, bulbs. Made my "Transciever" from parcel box with bulbs and thumblers. :D
Next step was, modified Christmas Lights string adding gramaphone with bent disk that touched stop control when rotating: I cut a wire, connected one to some bolt in motor assembly, another to stop control. Then called mom to show her how the tree is flashed. In rush touched both metal disk and metal stop control and got shocked by 220V through bulbs. I did not show that to mom, I did not want to spoil the effect by such minor accident. :)
 
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In rush touched both metal disk and metal stop control and got shocked by 220V through bulbs. I did not show that to mom, I did not want to spoil the effect by such minor accident. :)

Anyone her know what happens when you take a 12vdc motor out of a slot car and plug the leads into a 120 vac electrical outlet???? Ahem........ I doooooo..... :rolleyes:
 

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