At 18 years of age he has already been collecting for years. Most of his collection are things like Commodore and Apple computers. These can sit on a shelf and be moved around with ease. When he saw an IBM z890 Mainframe up for grabs he jumped on it. With a bit of excavation he was able to get it into his parents basement.
Kuzyatech has acquired a a Weston 6000, Vintage Multimeter and performed a very detailed Teardown of the device. The meter looks very interesting but it sure isn’t the most ergonomic unit. It isn’t shown in the picture but the multimeter has the test lead jacks located on the right side of the body, that is a strange location but when you see how the fuse and batteries are replaced
Maxxarcade demonstrates a QSC A21 Amplifier Repair, the defective amp would blow the fuse on power up. He has an interesting technique of using a variac and a low wattage light bulb in series with the power input to lessen the current draw to prevent additional damage. The over current prevention technique didn’t allow the amp to draw enough power to work properly and sound good but it proved
 This is an interesting look into old school rectifiers. Mercury Arc Rectifier have now been replaced with solid state bridge rectifiers which are inexpensive and reliable. I wonder how many of these Mercury Arc Rectifiers are still in operation, it seems that lots of this old stuff will be kept in use until it fails. “Operation of the rectifier relies on an electrical arc discharge between electrodes in
This forum post over at the EEVBlog Forum gives us a great look at the inside of an old Tektronix 465 Oscilloscope and walks through the repair and refurbishment of the scope. The refurbishment isn’t just taking a cotton swab and rubbing out some dirt, it is rather invasive including a complete system dismantle and cleaning. Nice thing about this method is we get to see all of the
Have a look at this fun project called the Shy Light. The light doesn’t like to be seen in public and uses a basket to hide in. X10 and two microcontrollers are being used to get the job done. “Why TWO Microcontrollers? The Dual-Microcontroller Circuit: Master (right) Slave (left) The Master Control microcontroller handles the foot-switch input, orchestrates the timing of the opening/closing of the basket (using commands to
 Bruce sent in a link to this cool picture of a very old display in this 1901 picture (top of the tallest building in the picture). It looks to be a primitive 16 segment display. The building is The Great Coal Mine, Coney Island. I wonder what the display was used for? Below you can see the modern version of this display. “The Great Coal Mine was a
