Estate Sale Score?!

[Wil_Bloodworth]

My mother has always been a big fan of going to estate sales so it occurred to me that these might also be a good source for electronics.

Today, my wife and I went to our first estate sale and while I was not a fan with the "crowd" of people and was very happy to leave as soon as possible, I think there were a few pieces that were worth our trip/time.

I have no idea what the man was trying to build with that Frankenstein board but it was 50 cents so the components and switches alone were worth it for me to pick up.

Each of the meters were $2 so for $4.50, I think I came out nicely.  Although, I have no idea what they're worth or if they even work... but I got to spend the morning with my wife without the kids so that is a win-win regardless.



- Wil

[Stray Electron]

  That's some OLD stuff right there!  Micranta was one of Radio Shack's product lines and as typical TRS, they were inexpensive but functional. It's probably from the early 1970s.  I hope no one left the batteries in it and destroyed it.  EICO was an inexpensive hobbiest brand and I'm guessing that the VTVM dates from about 1970. The same thing about the batteries applies and also, some of them used high voltage batteries such as 22 1/2 volt that are unobtainable today.  I had several pieces of EICO stuff in my youth and I never had any problems with it but I doubt that it was particularly accurate. Still today, anything with a CRT is a novelty!  Build one of the octopus circuits and make curve tracer out of it!

  The board is a mystery! You'd have to try and draw a schematic to figure out what it does. But it looks like a good source of parts. That looks like a good ten turn pot on the bottom and jack posts are always useful.

   That was a good buy IMO. It's always fun to tear down old equipment like that and learn how it works and try to make it live again. 

[Stray Electron]

  PS what is the part number of the "transistor" on the board?  It might be a voltage regulator and the switches and resistors might be there to switch the output voltage and/or current limit.

[floobydust]

Those were some good deals, if you're into vintage stuff. Sometimes you can figure out what the guy was into - HAM etc.
Eico VTVM with octals in it, 6SN7, 6J6 and in good shape.

The Frankenstein box looks like precision current control - 4 resistors in parallel for the one step.
I think the TO-3 case is connected to the front panel? So that might wake up a person.

[Wil_Bloodworth]

Those were some good deals, if you're into vintage stuff. Sometimes you can figure out what the guy was into - HAM etc.

Just FYI, he was a model airplane builder (hobby) and the estate sale guy said he worked for TI as an EE (back in the day).

- Wil

[Wil_Bloodworth]

I was able to partially get the cover off of the Micranta but one screw was being stubborn so I'm letting it soak for a while.  It did/does have an old Duracell in it though so I'm assuming that is completely dead.

The EICO does have a battery in it that appears to be older than I so it is going to need some work.  It will be a fun project to get working again nonetheless!  Other than being dirty, it is mint condition (with the obvious exception of old paper capacitors).

- Wil

[TimFox]

The Eico VTVM is an example of what I referred to in another post:  the ACV and Ohms scales use a separate input from the DCV input connector.
The DC probe wasn't in your photo:  it almost certainly used a shielded cable to the 1/4" phone plug, with a 1 megohm series resistor near the probe tip (possibly in a shielded can).
You may need to build a new probe:  a 1% 1 megohm resistor will suffice.
The Micronta could have been designed to use the 1 megohm probe with the FET input, but this one apparently didn't (only 10 megohm input resistance).

[Wil_Bloodworth]

The Eico VTVM is an example of what I referred to in another post:  the ACV and Ohms scales use a separate input from the DCV input connector.
The DC probe wasn't in your photo:  it almost certainly used a shielded cable to the 1/4" phone plug, with a 1 megohm series resistor near the probe tip (possibly in a shielded can).
You may need to build a new probe:  a 1% 1 megohm resistor will suffice.

Looks like the original construction manual calls for a 15MOhm resistor. Wow.



- Wil

[CatalinaWOW]

That is a high value resistor, but back in the day not out of line.  Vacuum tubes are high impedance devices and when they ruled electronics common resistor values ran from low kOhms through low MOhms.  Transistors are a completely different animal and so common resistors are from a few ohms up to a few kOhms.

[Stray Electron]

Those were some good deals, if you're into vintage stuff. Sometimes you can figure out what the guy was into - HAM etc.

Just FYI, he was a model airplane builder (hobby) and the estate sale guy said he worked for TI as an EE (back in the day).

- Wil

   I'm an old RC model airplane buff and I'd like to have seen what he had. I've been going to garage sales and estate sales for years but I've found very little model AC stuff. My last find (about 7 or 8 years ago now) was a McCoy 35 Red Head engine.  For those that don't know, the McCoy engines were originally designed and built by Damon Lee "aka Dick" McCoy, the brother of Col Norman Wright McCoy.  McCoy Air Force Base, now Orlando International Airport, was named for him after he was killed in the crash of a B-47 bomber near Orlando in 1957. I've only ever seen two original old McCoy engines and I found both of them in Orlando. 

[Wil_Bloodworth]

   I'm an old RC model airplane buff and I'd like to have seen what he had. I've been going to garage sales and estate sales for years but I've found very little model AC stuff. My last find (about 7 or 8 years ago now) was a McCoy 35 Red Head engine.  For those that don't know, the McCoy engines were originally designed and built by Damon Lee "aka Dick" McCoy, the brother of Col Norman Wright McCoy.  McCoy Air Force Base, now Orlando International Airport, was named for him after he was killed in the crash of a B-47 bomber near Orlando in 1957. I've only ever seen two original old McCoy engines and I found both of them in Orlando.

Here is the listing to the estate sale if you want to look through the photos... not much there to see though.
https://www.estatesales.net/TX/Richardson/75080/3896520

[schmitt trigger]

Deja Vu!
This exact same Micronta FET VOM model was my very first multimeter that I could afford. Back in the mid 1970s.
As others have mentioned, it was adequate for hobbyist use and reasonably priced, although not really inexpensive. At least not for me.

I treated it with the utmost care, but a few years later the plastic case began to disintegrate. First were the handle bushings, then the back cover, then the input bushing, then the whole case. The plastic simply started rotting away, like multimeter leprosy. I patched it for a while, but eventually I had to throw it away.

[Stray Electron]

   I'm an old RC model airplane buff and I'd like to have seen what he had. I've been going to garage sales and estate sales for years but I've found very little model AC stuff. My last find (about 7 or 8 years ago now) was a McCoy 35 Red Head engine.  For those that don't know, the McCoy engines were originally designed and built by Damon Lee "aka Dick" McCoy, the brother of Col Norman Wright McCoy.  McCoy Air Force Base, now Orlando International Airport, was named for him after he was killed in the crash of a B-47 bomber near Orlando in 1957. I've only ever seen two original old McCoy engines and I found both of them in Orlando.

Here is the listing to the estate sale if you want to look through the photos... not much there to see though.
https://www.estatesales.net/TX/Richardson/75080/3896520

  A lot of cool old stuff!  If I'm not mistaken several of those model airplane engines have the points on them for use with a spark plug ignition system! The engine on the left looks like a McCoy redhead but with points and a rear intake instead of the later front intake.  (My McCoy 48 is built like that and it has points.)  The man also had a lot of good well-built hand tools and it looks like he took good care of them.

[schmitt trigger]

Some thoughts about estate sales....
They do have a very nostalgic, sometimes sad feel about it.

You see the items that the deceased collected and one point very cherished, that now have become just a little more valuable than junk.
I once saw, from someone that had worked at Bell Labs during WW2, a whole RadLab book collection that was given away for $1. Yes, only $1 was offered for information that in the 1940 could even be classified as top secret. And those were hardcover books.
At that particular sale, I scored a pair of very old electronics books, which had already been thrown in the trash.

[Wil_Bloodworth]

Some thoughts about estate sales....
They do have a very nostalgic, sometimes sad feel about it.

You see the items that the deceased collected and one point very cherished, that now have become just a little more valuable than junk.
I once saw, from someone that had worked at Bell Labs during WW2, a whole RadLab book collection that was given away for $1. Yes, only $1 was offered for information that in the 1940 could even be classified as top secret. And those were hardcover books.
At that particular sale, I scored a pair of very old electronics books, which had already been thrown in the trash.

Yes, it can be a bit sad.  I completely ripped apart that custom board that I bought for $0.50 yesterday and the entire time I was doing so I was thinking, "I could be ripping apart someone's life's work without a care in the world".  But what are you going to do?!

The value of things rises and falls with the economy and technological advancements make things obsolete that were once quite valuable.  That's life.  Do I have a need for an ancient vacuum tube meter? Absolutely not. Will I ever use it?  Maybe once or twice but probably just for enjoyment. Then, it will just sit on the shelf until my estate sale and it will be off to the next tinkerer.

The only reason (for me) to purchase something like this is to have something to do when I'm not working.  If anyone is using outdated equipment like this, it has to be out of nostalgia only as just about any modern equivalent is arguably far better.  Someone can probably come up with an esoteric reason to justify usage of old equipment but ultimately, they're lying to themselves and trying to justify their biased reasoning for clinging to the past. But hey, you do you; I don't care.

I enjoy fixing old things and learning how they were created which gives me a glimpse into the thought processes of inventors 100+ years ago.  There really isn't any real/actual value in fixing antique electronics (or antique anything for that matter).  You're definitely not going to make a "good" living doing so.  I would argue you could make more money working at any fast food restaurant than you could fixing up AM radios from the 1940s.  You can purchase reconditioned ones in good working order for $25 all day long... probably containing far more than $25 in modern components.  People just don't care anymore and no one listens to AM radio... but it's neat and fun to play with if you have nothing else valuable to do with your time.  Fishing and golf is probably better for your health in the long run.

It's even a challenge to interest my children in modern technology such as Arduinos.  They are just spoiled with complete products that work perfectly out of the box.  Why learn how to build something when you can purchase a brand new one for $100 and move on with your life?  Kids these days don't even know how to tie knots or start a fire.  Today, average/basic electronics are just too cheap when compared to income and the effort needed to earn said $100. To top that off, electronics are 100,000+ times more complex than electronics from 80 years ago.  Back then, you could learn to work on these radios with a few weeks of training (based on the time it has taken me to 'get up to speed' "enough").  Today, you need an entire lab of fairly pricey equipment and just about need a microscope to even look at and diagnose something.

Even in the 80s, you only needed to learn ONE programming language (fortan/C/C++/COBOL) on one operating system to be employable. In the 90s, you maybe had to learn a second language (Pascal/Java) just to keep yourself marketable.  By the end of the 90s with the advent of the internet, programmers had to learn many languages (HTML/JavaScript/CSS/SQL/C#/HTTP) and tangential technologies such as networking, threading, security, cryptography, and so on.  By the time 2010 rolled around, programmers were of the mindset, "I should've been a doctor so I could've at least stopped having to learn new stuff every six months!".  Today, it's virtually impossible to keep up with and be an expert in more than one "vertical".  You're not going to be an expert in 15 languages.  You're not going to be an expert in mobile, web, desktop (windows/mac/linux), and embedded systems.  You're only human and the amount of information that can be mastered and remembered is limited and to try be a master in many fields is, well, foolish.

So, what are we to do about this other than be grumpy and tell kids to, "Get off my lawn!"?  I have no idea and honestly, I don't feel like I have to worry about it any longer as I'm "on the way out". Those kids who are spoiled brats and can't tie their shoes or change a flat tire can figure it out for themselves!

The estate sale adventure was somewhat fun but I am definitely not going to make a habit of it as I have better things to do with my remaining time and collecting trinkets is akin to hoarding in my mind.  My plan with these "finds" is to fix them up and give them away.

- Wil

[CatalinaWOW]

While I generally agree with your points about the value of these old goodies, there are exceptions that may factor for some.

An obvious one, because of the technology of the day these were designed to deal with higher voltages (and lower currents) than todays gear.  There are times when that is a factor.

AM radios are generally nearly worthless as you say.  But some models have style appeal and can sell for large values to people who have no interest in radios at all, they just want a collectors item or art object.  If you can find that market you are ok.

A similar example is the the UI on some (a fairly small subset, but some) of the older instruments is better than anything you can get at comparable price today.  While the cost of elx has dropped dramatically, the difficulty of doing a really good UI has not, and it shows on many modern products.

I share your desire to limit my own accumulation, but still periodically attend these types of sales.  I just try to limit my acquisitions to the true gems.  And learn a bit about interesting lives.  One I dropped in on had several kit airplanes along with the tools to assemble such toys.  And this was just one indication of a life of very broad interests.

[Wallace Gasiewicz]

There are some AM radios that are quite popular and have gone up in value. These are the Short Wave Transistor radios mostly. 
Like the Zenith Transoceanic. The older tube models are very high in value but have to be in good physical condition.   

Some folks like to collect these things and since collections take up room, these smaller radios are more popular than bigger ones.