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Appreciating Sinclair and Shrinking down Tech'

cstanton

This BBC spotlight/documentary caught my attention recently, from the manufacturing processes to the technology that Sinclair created in the earlier years of their products.

It's no surprise that some of the products mentioned go for, frankly, crazy prices online.

Though I was also distracted thinking "what if I wanted to create something like this?"

image

While we may be able to create prototype electronics from the home of the internals, the enclosure of something so small may be trickier. Unless you have perhaps a resin 3D printer, I haven't seen many people create something like this from say, small-scale, thin sheet metal(s).

Perhaps there's still some way to go for homemade fabrication? Especially when it comes to enclosures.

How do you handle enclosure design?

  • Hi Christopher,

    Probably I'd want to make a friend who works with CNC, say on a trading estate, if I wanted to make such a watch case. Apparently it's not too expensive to get things machined, especially if you ask for 50 or so to be made, since once the machine is programmed, they may as well churn out many parts. Someone I know made their money back on just three pieces, which were for a car part that the manufacturer wanted several hundred £ for. They used one part on their own car, and sold the other two pieces.

    I have a cheap hand-mill so it's not difficult to machine basic shapes (from aluminium, or more preferably delrin or acetal, since they are great to machine with), although I cannot manage some features that may need (say) a rotary table, or CNC. Polished (e.g. mirror) finishes are easy to do, whereas the rippled effect isn't. The milling machine was the best tool purchase I have made in ages, it has worked well for 7+ years, but if I had to do it again, I would have saved up a bit more and got a slightly larger model. I paid £600, but prices are higher now (about £750 nowadays).  

  • You really want to use appropriate methods that best meet requirements, although the best method may simply be the one you have access to. You can always setup your own versions of many popular methods:

    carving, beaten metal, bending, cutting, stamping, deep drawing, casting, molding, forging, vacuum forming, milling, welding, gluing, laser cutting, printing, etc. There are many more and many variations on most of these.

  • Just saw the e-bay advert.. wow. Would be amazed if anyone (apart from a sinclair museum!) offered more than £100 for that. To me at least, the Spectrum 48k is more iconic. That looked really futuristic at the time, and still looks good. 

  • EEVblog has reviewed a number of Sinclair inventions. The C5 vehicle, ZX Spectrum, Pocket TV. I also thought the Sinclair Cambridge calculator, but I can't find that back.


    image

  • Cool stuff!  I did a little looking on past ebay sales and I did see a sold item that offered under the asking price of £750.00 .  Not sure how lower the seller went, but I assume it was not too much.

  • in reply to genebren

    There's a video here:

    where the comments suggest that £400 could be a price for a working watch.. still seems expensive to me, but I always had the impression most Sinclair stuff (apart from the home computers) was undesirable even when new! There was always an Achilles heel with every Sinclair product (e.g. important features missing, or poor build quality, or plain misunderstanding of customer use-case). By mid-80's it would have been pretty embarrassing wearing that.

  • in reply to shabaz

    I am a big fan. But the C5 - I think - should never have left the prototyping space.

    The reason why people didn't want to use it, must have been obvious during the first tests on the road (particularly in the UK where the weather isn't always bright and dry)

    • you sit in traffic between cars, under the view range of normal cars and definitely trucks. They added a flag pole later (while it was already in use) but that doesn't do
    • you sit with your mouth directly in the exhaust of every vehicle in front of you.
    • if it rains, you had to put a kind of tent around you, that also surrounded the vehicle. It rains a lot in UK
    • if there's smog or mist, you aren't visible at all. There's a lot of mist in the UK.
    • If it's dark, you aren't visible. It's dark a lot in the UK
    • You have a completely different speed than the traffic coming from behind you,
    • If you were behind another vehicle, no other traffic would know you would be there - danger for people taking over, entering the road, ... You just weren't visible at all
    • very very bad road stability, damping, behaviour in curbs
    • if you had to horn in danger, no one heard the silly beep.
    • Like other Sinclair devices, the physical build was flimsy. For a calculator or the home computers, it was ok because they were achievable. This vehicle was to be put in the midst of heavy traffic.

    other, non-safety related:

    • you don't look cool in it, unless you wanted to show geek energy, a socially awkward vehicle - and cars are the thing to show how well you do in society
    • you had to peddle too, and that wasn't a smooth peddle. It was a struggle to assist the motor with the overflimsy pedal and chain mechanism.
  • in reply to Jan Cumps

    You could say similar about a number of other forms of vehicle used on the roads however.

    I recall that one of the challenges of the time was that in order for the vehicle to comply with the newly created "electrically assisted pedal cycle" legislation requirements in order to avoid registration, vehicle tax, insurance, drivers license, helmet and so on; restricted the top speed to 15.5MPH, weight to around 60kg, and max power to 250W. Battery technology at the time didn't help for weight, range and power.

  • in reply to beacon_dave

    Yes. but they are on the cycle path. at a hight that can be seen by other traffic participants. And still vulnerable. The C5 was on the main road. Under almost everyone's radar.

  • in reply to Jan Cumps

    No-one understood the C5 : ) 

    I remember as schoolkids probably most of me and my friends did not know what gadgets were, there wasn't much unessential stuff being bought in those days. I assumed most products had a use. C5 was one of the first things on TV that made even me question what the point of it was : ) Earlier Sinclair products mostly flew under the radar (no Internet, and if the one tech show on TV didn't cover it, then it didn't exist) although we all knew the ZX Spectrum (and a friend had a ZX81 which must have been awesome to newcomers, since it was a (kind-of) affordable computer (still too expensive for a lot of families), but actually using it was a challenge... I recall the screen bouncing whenever a character was typed : ) 

    My first two computers were an Amstrad competitor to the ZX Spectrum, and also a Casio FX-730P.. loved that machine! It was absolutely brilliant, the BASIC language it had was pretty good for a portable device, more than enough memory to do useful stuff, and it was reasonably affordable. I still have it somewhere, that computer never dies : )