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HP 181A vintage scope - shipping fail

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TerraHertz:
Today's tragic example of stupidly inadequate packing for shipment... A vintage HP 181A oscilloscope, with a smashed CRT.



Cause: A good solid box, good padding around the corner rack brackets, but on the top and bottom faces effectively zero padding. Just the box cardboard, a couple more sheets of very thin cardboard, and a couple of layers of that very thin soft sheeting - about 2mm thick. So nothing that could compress much to absorb an impact.

At some point the box has been dropped heavily flat on the ground. Very high-G sudden halt of the scope, and the tube shattered.

I'm furious with myself, because on seeing the pics of the box outside (sent by my reshipper in CA USA) I thought the box looked pretty strong and so I'd trust the packer. I had it onshipped without being opened for photos of the scope.
Result: no way to tell if it was smashed in the USA postal system, or by DHL on the way from CA to here in Sydney.

I kind of suspect the former, but it's not provable.  And without those photos the onshiping insurance is 'delivery only.'

Bah. I've been getting slack with having Shipito open stuff. Impatient... so this is a costly writeoff.

Now to see if I can find a replacement CRT. I doubt it.

Stray Electron:
    What does it cost to get something like that shipped to your part of the world from the US?   I saw several of these at a hamfest in Florida a few weeks ago. I don't recall the price but I don't think that there was any interest in them and I do remember that one had a spectrum analyzer plug in in it.

  Do you know if the 181A uses the same CRT tube as any of HP's other gear?

TerraHertz:

Just some broken glass.  The whole scope is full of little glass fragments. Shaking the frame, more just keep falling out.
The problem with that is they are metalized. So small shards stuck in amongst the electronics may have bad effects on power up.

I bet it made a loud implosion bang when it went. So whatever bozo dropped the box would have known about it.

Since it keeps shedding sharp little glass fragments, I can't work on it anywhere other than 'in a tub' - the original box. Tiny flakes of glass still make it out onto the floor, so it's concrete floor or nothing. Have to be able to sweep/vac them all up later. I have cats.


It's not often you see the inside of a storage CRT. There are two extremely fine meshes. They've been mangled by fragments of glass.


What really burns, is the box he used was orignally a good size for the scope. There would have been room for a couple of inches of soft padding under and over the scope.  But no, he cut down the box height. Sob.

TerraHertz:

--- Quote from: Stray Electron on March 18, 2022, 01:34:24 pm ---    What does it cost to get something like that shipped to your part of the world from the US?   I saw several of these at a hamfest in Florida a few weeks ago. I don't recall the price but I don't think that there was any interest in them and I do remember that one had a spectrum analyzer plug in in it.

  Do you know if the 181A uses the same CRT tube as any of HP's other gear?

--- End quote ---

Shipping cost, Torrance CA to Sydney Aus:


Something amusing in the HP 181A/AR manual - in the entire manual there is ONE page with an ink color besides black.
This:


Just so users will know the traces are green.

The tube HP part number is 5083-1952.   Seems it was only used in the 180 & 181 scopes.
I have found one for sale. New in box, and amazingly it's in Australia. But the seller wants too much for it. Still to be seen if he'll come down to something less than I paid for the scope. I suspect he's not into electronics and may have an inflated idea of the practical value.

Re lack of interest in old scopes - yes, who would be interested? They are a pain. I bought this one because I'll be setting up a 'retro room' with old computers (DEC PDP8/S, HP 1000, type of things) and I wanted a period scope for show.  But working!
Not taking it seriously was another reason I skipped the photos at the reshipper.

Stray Electron:
  Good grief! THAT hurts! 

   I would think that any reshipper would automatically want to open and examine every package that they handle just to ensure that they wouldn't be blamed for damage that was incurred before they received the package and to ensure that it was adequately packed.

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