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From: Cursitor Doom <cd@notformail.com>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: Favourite Test Equipment
Date: Mon, 01 Apr 2024 18:33:20 +0100
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On Mon, 1 Apr 2024 17:34:24 +0100, liz@poppyrecords.invalid.invalid
(Liz Tuddenham) wrote:

>Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid> wrote:
>
>> I learned the basics of how electrons behave and move as a small kid from
>>this book: [...] > I remember walking the streets of Amsterdam looking
>>for usable parts for my own TV in primary school
>
>Jan, you forget that we had the *advantage* of starting from the
>beginning and having to make or scrounge everything. 
>
>When I started, there was nobody with much knowledge of electronics to
>help me and very little material of any kind.  My city had been bombed
>during WWII (not as bad as Amsterdam, but bad, nevertheless) and both my
>grandfathers showed us how to make furniture from odd scraps of wood.
>The family motto seemed to be "If you can't make it, you can't have it".
>
>I eventually learned to solder with a gigantic 65-watt iron that could
>undo two tags of an octal valveholder while you tried to solder the
>third.  I saved my pocket money for a year to buy a government surplus
>multimeter - and when it arrived, the pointer was lopsided and the
>safety cutout had been glued solid.  There was no "Sale of Goods Act", I
>just had to take it apart and mend it myself.
>
>I begged scrap radio and television sets off a local repair shop to use
>as a source of components - you made what you could with whatever you
>had to hand.  Government surplus valves were available but expensive;
>you just had to hope they were not too low on emission, because nobody
>had any way of testing them.  Amplifiers were 'designed' by rote: the
>anode load resistor of a 6J7 was 47k - or 100k - nobody knew why.  A 6V6
>needed a transformer to match it to the loudspeaker - any transformer, -
>nobody knew how to calculate ratios and it wouldn't have mattered if
>they had, because the chances of finding the correct transformer were
>nil.   Data sheets were a closely-guarded secret, I never even saw one
>until I went to college.  
>
>My first oscilloscope was an EMI WM2 (partly designed by Alan Blumlein,
>I believe).  It was absolutely lethal to work on and most of the
>components were out of specification or intermittent, so It only worked
>for brief periods between long intervals of failure and repair. 
>
>When I took the job of setting up an electronics workshop for an
>educational establishment, we could afford a 12v soldering iron but no
>transformer, so I begged a scrap pre-war one off my cousin's business.
>I set about building a stabilised power supply around it, but it had to
>be switched off each time I wanted to make a soldered joint, so I had to
>be quick and finish each connection before the iron cooled down.  We had
>no large resistors, so I loaded the power supply on test with a plastic
>bowl full of salty water and a couple of pieces of aluminium plate.
>
>Many of the huge 'boat anchors' of test gear, so despised by the modern
>generation  are still working and still perfectly adequate   ...as long
>as you know what you are doing.

Yes, and more importantly, they can be *kept working* indefinitely
because although they do blow up quite frequently, they're also
pre-SMT, so even people with my shaky hands and poor eyesight can
repair them. Thank god for through-hole!
Your comment on the soldering iron reminded me of my first one which
had to be heated up with a blowlamp. I managed to find one on Ebay for
illustration:

https://tinyurl.com/kbanemun