Plans, Sept 2014
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As the years have rolled
on by domestic entertainment equipment has become more and more
difficult and expensive to repair.
Once upon a time a TV engineer
usually removed the back of a TV and swapped a valve.
Then, with the advent of transistors,
repairs became more difficult.
When integrated circuits arrived
things became more difficult again.
Now with large scale integration
it's unlikely that individual replacement chips will be available
after a few years because of the advances in technology.
As I've long passed the state
retirement age and am a recipient of a pension I no longer have
to fix domestic equipment to bring in cash.
On the other hand, I still repair
circuit boards for lifts and escalators (and the odd historic
radio and modern computers of course). I sometimes fix other
things as a favour. A Panasonic DB Radio/CD player from 2009
arrived yesterday (6th Feb 2015). It was dead and after removing
no fewer than 40 screws , some hidden, I extracted the chassis
(an hour later). Attached to this, mostly with sticky tape was
the power supply. Inside its cover would you believe was a plug-in
fuse. This was intact. Deeper inside I found a short-circuit
diode marked S6-98. I fitted a 1N4005 and put in a new 1000uF
capacitor adjacent to it. Clearly repair when the thing was designed
must have been thought out of the question as labour costs will
swamp its value.
There are still lots of circuit
boards around in lift controllers that use transistors and early
integrated circuits, and because the cost of replacing a lift
controller can be as much as a new motor car there is still money
to be made in this repair business.
Having made the decision to
get rid of anything involved in the repair of TV sets, VCRs and
modern audio equipment I have a lot more space in which to display
my radio collection. shown here around two sides of my workshop.
When I started the website in
2000 the best Internet speed was 56kbps and I was asked by visitors
to make sure all the pictures were suitably small to download
without an interminable wait, but times have changed and, with
speeds in some locations over a thousand times better than this,
high definition pictures will eventually replace originals.
As the months pass I'll update
the pictures and more things will appear here (note.. all four
sides of the old workshop are now used for the displays).
Pictures immediately below show
the start of the reorganisation and further down some of the
re-organised displays. |
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The first step in the
workshop/museum overhaul was the purchase of more dexion, or
to be more accurate its cheaper substitute made in Scotland.
The first lot I bought over a year ago now supports the amateur
radio transmitters and receivers. The second lot now carries
several shelves in front of my double window. This also extended
to shelves to replace some unsupported wood and heaps of radios
piled on top of each other.
I then arranged equal height
equipment on the latter, with a selection of sets including most
of my Eddystone receivers, an AR88, an AR77, R206, R109 and ZC1
on the window shelves. The rear shelves now carry four R107 receivers
and three AR88 receivers plus an assortment of others. |
Here are pictures of
work in progress at 8th Feb 2015
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No less than four R107s,
three AR88s, two HROs and a 52H receiver. Front left a pair of
wavemeters for tuning an airborne spark transmitter. |
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Hotch potch of stuff including
an early 1920s Philips mains radio, a pair of HT37s, an R208,
BC221, HRO loudspeaker, Sailor HF transmitter etc |
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Two R1132 receivers plus
mostly modern test gear plus a sonobuoy receiver. |
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That blue fronted equipment
is a 3-phase mains generator which I use for testing industrial
stuff. It's a trifle noisy because it needs a quarter horsepower
3-phase motor to be connected in parallel with a non-motor load.
You'll note from the flag, it's made in Britain. |
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Lots of tidying then more
photos to follow... Components will get demoted in favour of
more radios on display.
I see it's around 15 months
that I planned to reorganise the radio museum. I'll probably
put that down to my delaying retirement, but today 18th June
2016, I hauled down countless plastic drawers full of components
and erected a new dexion rack to carry radios in their place.
The new racking is allocated to RAF equipment. This stuff seems
to be in three main heights which makes planning the layout a
trifle awkward. Setting aside the R1155/T1154 which are odd heights
the WW2 radios are in cases which are generally 19" wide
and around 9 inches tall. Other equipment and some cold war stuff
is about 7" tall and everything will fit into a 12"
deep rack, but with some overhang. American stuff is not very
tall. One or two items didn't fit too well at present so I'll
leave these till later. Below are photographs starting with the
new RAF rack then going clockwise around the room. |
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Spare Parts
The most difficult thing
to organise is where to locate spare parts. These are in two
major categories: old stuff dating from WW2 and new stuff, particularly
components for repairing modern equipment. There's also a third
category which is early radio components dating from the 1920s
and 30s but I keep this type of stuff elsewhere.
The problems I have are twofold;
first where to physically put the stuff and secondly how to access
it, especially modern components. The latter, access, I've dealt
with by constructing a number of databases which list components
and provide their location. For example my stock of semiconductors
includes about 1000 items mostly linked to their specifications,
so I can readily see if I have say an IGBT rated at 120W and
1,200V. Then there's a database for my stock of valves which
I note now includes something like 4,000 in 1,273 types. A few
days ago I catalogued my stock of quartz crystals, a mere 159.
Tens of thousands of resistors are sorted into a variety of types,
chiefly by their power rating but cataloguing capacitors is long
overdue because I have so many so I just have to remember their
general type and location. Then there are hundreds of modern
relays, surface mounted passive parts, switches, transformers,
valve holders, connectors, potentiometers and a host of small
items (which I keep in sets of plastic drawers). Small semiconductors
are stored in small sealable plastic bags and kept in part-number
order in three or four boxes. There are some bits and pieces
which are bulky so I've made boxes fitted with wheels which I
keep under benches. These are for storing cables, drums of wire,
computer parts and other useful things. Also metalwork for contructional
projects, mostly salvaged from things like computer power supplies,
cases etc etc.
To simplify the system I don't
bother monitoring stock levels. To do this would need a duplicate
of myself so if I find a plastic bag is empty or has too small
a number of parts I'll just order more from a supplier. |
Now, moving on to May
2018
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I decided to continue
improvements. There are two or three things that dictate the
way the workshop is arranged. When I first converted the double
garage I decided to fit strong workbenches round all four walls.
These are made from thick kitchen worktops that were all slightly
damaged and being sold at around a quarter of the undamaged price.
I added angle iron under the fronts as I was handling large CRT
style TV sets at the time and some, such as large Sony sets weighed
in at over a hundredweight (or 50.9Kgm for overseas readers).
As things became crowded (such as when lots of faulty sets were
received in a short space of time), I decided to make better
use the loft space and bought a folding ladder. This is another
of the things that dictates the workshop layout. Being more of
a radio museum should relegate boxes of spare parts to somewhere
less obvious so a new layout was planned. I decided to keep a
central area but to design this to better accommodate the loft
ladder. I reckoned I could move the rack carrying the RAF equipment
a few inches nearer the front of the workshop, allowing me to
move a large chest of drawers to exactly line up with the ladder.
All the spare parts could be moved out of sight to the rear of
the space occupied by the ladder. A bonus would be that I could
construct an extra rack in which to place radios. |
A year later mid 2019
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Continuing to shift commercial
repairs from the workshop, I constructed a lean-to shed behind
the workshop into which I store commercial equipments (predominantly
surplus to requirements or unrepairable) but retained for parts
where these become un-sourceable. |
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