Actions
Forum Thread Details
  • Replies 143 replies
  • Subscribers 366 subscribers
  • Views 11513 views
  • Users 0 members are here
Related

Show us your junk!

neuromodulator

I love junk, specially when it can be fully restored, has interesting parts or uses interesting technology. Most of the junk I get, comes from the university, its dumped because its either too old or it doesn't work anymore. I'll start this thread by showing one of my latest junk acquisitions:

 

imageimageimage

 

 

This is an autotransformer made by a company called "The Superior Electric Co" from Bristol, Connecticut. It was apparently build in the 60s (according to what I found in the net) and supports a max of 1.2 kva. The autotransformer works as expected but of course it shows its age, the rubber cable is not in the best condition and so isn't its paint. In the future I may repaint it and replace the cable but for now its good enough as it is.

 

Have you also found nice junk? Show us!

  • in reply to dougw

    Is this something used to clean or align lenses or anyway some kind of optical tool for parallax collimation?

  • in reply to dougw

    That looks like a micromanipulator! But judging by the axes, it looks like something that you would use on an optical table to align lasers or lenses.

  • in reply to balearicdynamics

    You are both right - it is something like that. I assume it is used to align optical processing components like filters or switches with optical fibers.

  • More junk to clean, restore and fix. Apparently the cable is all what was wrong... Can you guess what this is?

    image

  • in reply to neuromodulator

    Here is the first processor controlled instrument I designed. Intel 8748, code hand assembled on paper and entered into Intel desktop dev system by hand in hex.

    Not really junk, but not very useful now.

    image

    PCB date is 1982.

     

    The design was done for Post Office/BT as a replacement for their own design which used a few transistors and several relays.

    They never bought any but it got them interested and we developed several quite nice test instruments for them.

    The nicest was the ..356 which used six or 8 (can't remember) Xilinx XC2064 FPGAs.

     

    MK

  • Beautiful Variac (or variable autotransformer). Years ago I got one that is quite useful around the lab.

    I have a few interesting bits that I can post here. Not as "vintage" as yours, but hopefully interesting.

    TI Programmer's calculator (1977)

    image

    image

    Tektronix TWD120 Digitizer (1995)

    image

    image

  • in reply to neuromodulator

    The centrifuge is finally operational with a new cable and cleaned inside out. Interestingly the motor uses water cooling, there is a copper coil around the stator that connects to the 2 protruding pipes.

    imageimage





    imageimage

  • in reply to michaelkellett

    That thing looks interesting Michael, what is that for?

  • in reply to neuromodulator

      wrote:

     

    That thing looks interesting Michael, what is that for?

    I should have said that !

     

    It's a relay tester - in 1982 the British telephone network still used a lot of relays and they had some very old fashioned and large things for testing them.

    The 1470 was an attempt at a more modern tool that would be cheaper, more reliable and much lighter.

    You set up the conditions to end the timing with the first switch, to initiate the test and start the timer with the second and the third chooses between measuring operate or release time.

    The display indicates in ms.

    I haven't powered mine up for a couple of years but it seemed to still work. Although I designed it I don't have drawings - I may well have my lab notes but I haven't looked.

     

    MK

  • This is old junk I definitely can live without : )

    A turn of the century laptop.. I bought it used, it is a Pentium with MMX : ) I have not been able to power it up for years because the supply had died, but I tried it with a bench PSU today and it worked : )

    Booted up to Windows 95 : ) I didn't run it for long because I cannot remove the battery, the door is stuck. Still, it's Ni-Cd, about the most rugged battery technology ever.

    It has a floppy drive slot : ) and a cdrom which ejects into the lap (visible at the lower-right). The in-built trackball was great though.

    image

    It doesn't have a lot on it.. (after I finished with it, my mum just used it for driving theory training CDROM stuff for a while).

    There's this ancient PCB cad package, that actually worked, but very primitive. Also it's got a 56002 compiler that I may copy off before finally throwing it out.

    image

    There's no USB socket. But it has one of the first ever Wi-Fi cards.! The current software on the PC is for WEP, so I cannot connect to any network : (

    image

     

    Here's another piece of now-useless junk.. it was home-built microcontroller board, using a 68HC11 chip. There's a nest of wiring between the PCB sandwich. One IC is missing, it's a MAX232 chip (the serial port is at the lower-left). The big chip is EEPROM (this particular microcontroller had external address/data bus capability).

    image