List your test equipment "scores" here!

[ketil b]

Just got these two beauties for just under AU$ 150 each delivered, not that much of a score but it's less than I thought I would have to pay to get one.

thanks

ketil

[eas]

With the front panel binding post option!

[Cubdriver]

Sweet!!  Nice power supplies.

-Pat

[basinstreetdesign]

About 47 years ago when I was in grade 12 electronics class at Ottawa Tech HS, we had some 3 broken Heathkit OS-12 scopes and the teacher asked for volunteers to fix them if possible.  I said I would get one working provided I get the carcasses from the other two used for parts.  I did it and when I got them home I found that one needed only a new fuse.  I've been sworn to secrecy from then on since I was told that heads would roll if the deal was found out.

[basinstreetdesign]

From last employer they were retiring:
HP 141 spectrum an. with plug ins 8552B and 8554B,
Tek 465 scope,
2 x Tek Prism 3001 logic an. with probes, manual,
all in good working (if not calibrated) order.
all for free.

[xwarp]

Finally got me a nice BK 501A curve tracer.

[gearhead]

Scored a few pieces for free. Had to drive to Houston to pick up a car load! Also had to do some minor repair on 2 of the scopes.
HP1740A,HP1725,HP1743,HP 6202B P/S, HP400GL, HP 400F, Plus some HP sig-gens and freq. counters.
Picked up a Tektronix 2337 Scope for $40 from CL, had to replace a bad capacitor and burned resistor.
Works like a new one!
Tek 475- $75
Tek Scope Cart.....FREE!

[AF6LJ]

Scored a few pieces for free. Had to drive to Houston to pick up a car load! Also had to do some minor repair on 2 of the scopes.
HP1740A,HP1725,HP1743,HP 6202B P/S, HP400GL, HP 400F, Plus some HP sig-gens and freq. counters.
Picked up a Tektronix 2337 Scope for $40 from CL, had to replace a bad capacitor and burned resistor.
Works like a new one!
Tek 475- $75
Tek Scope Cart.....FREE!

Nice score and thanks for saving this gear from the landfill.

[Cubdriver]

Scored a few pieces for free. Had to drive to Houston to pick up a car load! Also had to do some minor repair on 2 of the scopes.
HP1740A,HP1725,HP1743,HP 6202B P/S, HP400GL, HP 400F, Plus some HP sig-gens and freq. counters.
Picked up a Tektronix 2337 Scope for $40 from CL, had to replace a bad capacitor and burned resistor.
Works like a new one!
Tek 475- $75
Tek Scope Cart.....FREE!

Very nice!!  Sounds like it was a worthwhile trip.

-Pat

[robert_]

Dont know if it was too good an idea to buy it, but i dont regret it yet...
Lecroy WaveSurfer 24MXs-B described as "New, w/3 yrs Warranty" for less than 2,5kEur.

[JoeB83]

Scored a few pieces for free. Had to drive to Houston to pick up a car load! Also had to do some minor repair on 2 of the scopes.
HP1740A,HP1725,HP1743,HP 6202B P/S, HP400GL, HP 400F, Plus some HP sig-gens and freq. counters.
Picked up a Tektronix 2337 Scope for $40 from CL, had to replace a bad capacitor and burned resistor.
Works like a new one!
Tek 475- $75
Tek Scope Cart.....FREE!

I have the HP 6202B as well as an HP6205......great power supplies and amazing you got them for free. If I were looking to buy them today I'd be willing to spend a couple hundred $$.

[PTR_1275]

Not as good of a score as a lot of you guys / gals pick up, but I just got a Chroma 6512 AC power source, 0-300VRMS 0-20A 15-2000Hz(Max power 1200w) for less than $1000 AU delivered (Shipping was a fair chunk of that).

The unit arrived yesterday with a fairly nasty rattle, I popped the covers and found the main output stage had shifted. They go to a lot of effort to isolate the heatsink from everything else electrically, and this was hitting the next heatsink. I removed all the screws (There were a lot missing and they were rattling around in the case), took it out, refitted the brackets, re-mounted it before checking as much of the visible boards as I could. The input fuses were in tact, there were no blow marks or anything visible. This is the reason why you shouldn't turn it on, but take it apart. If I turned it on first, there would have been a heck of a lot of damage done, possibly rendering the unit useless.

Anyway, turned it on and after a few clunks of the relay and a very neat POST beep tune, it sprung into life. A few checks with meters and the scope and it is a few hundred mV out at 240V (Or my meter is, who knows). I have done some load testing this morning and it is working. Just need to get used to where stuff is in the menus and find out where I am going to fit this monstrosity on the bench (Seriously, it is 425mm x 225 x 575mm and weighs a lot). The only issues I see so far are the missing encoder knob and the display has horrible viewing angles (More of a display issue than the unit being faulty)

I'll try to get some photos and post them up.

[Chris Jones]

I managed to score 3 Agilent turbomolecular vac pumps that still spin freely so who knows what is "wrong" with those!

With or without controller units?
I've been looking for a turbomolecular pump (that works, ie with controller, that I can afford) for sooooo long. You lucky bastard.

Invariably the turbo pumps on ebay are without controller. The same seller may or may not also be selling some controllers, that may or may not be compatible or broken. All at stupid prices, How many of these things ever sell?
It seems incredibly stupid for sellers to separate the two parts, which are completely useless independently.

If one accepts the task of building a driver for the motor (probably a BLDC driver in most cases), then you would be able to bid on a lot of pumps that the majority of potential buyers will ignore because of the missing controller. There are a couple of people on youtube who have done it.

[rickselectricalprojects]

a friends dad finished a project (i think he was working on a static frequency converter with another company) and they were going to throw out a fluke 179 and a fluke 322 so he took them and gave them to me

[TerraHertz]

Invariably the turbo pumps on ebay are without controller. The same seller may or may not also be selling some controllers, that may or may not be compatible or broken. All at stupid prices, How many of these things ever sell?
It seems incredibly stupid for sellers to separate the two parts, which are completely useless independently.

If one accepts the task of building a driver for the motor (probably a BLDC driver in most cases), then you would be able to bid on a lot of pumps that the majority of potential buyers will ignore because of the missing controller. There are a couple of people on youtube who have done it.

Maybe. It's the kind of 'one off, open-ended, unknown unknowns' guaranteed lengthy design challenge that I prefer to avoid though. Other problems are that many turbo pumps have magnetic suspension, and involve a lot more than just spinning up a rotor via 3-phase AC drive. Besides, even lacking their controllers, virtually all the turbo pumps I see on ebay *still* cost more than I can afford. Especially for something that is in unknown condition, and probably there will be no identical unit available as replacement if something goes wrong with it. I have no idea why the prices for potential junk are so high. Is there really a market for used turbos, or do sellers all just assume there must be because new ones are so astronomically priced? Any time I watch a turbomolecular pump on ebay out of curiosity, they never sell. Has anyone here ever seen one sell?

This hunt is a never-ending frustration and torment. Now the guy with those 3 turbo pumps casually mentions that "He'd like to try spinning the one with a controller up, to see how it goes." He means, in room air. Oh God. I feel like screaming "NNNnnnnooooo!" but must stay calm and polite. He's not familiar at all with vacuum technology, has no idea about contamination, realistic pumping volumes, avoiding fingerprints on HVac surfaces, etc. Keeps taking the end caps off. Makes me want to cry.

Edit: Even complete wrecks of turbo pumps still list at stupid prices.  Have a look at ebay 141680021356
An Agilent TV 301 that's had a severe blade crash. Spectacularly mangled, but still listed at $150. Oh wait I'm sorry, $149.99.

Ha ha.. or a similarly wrecked one for $650! ebay 361266861150
Well, I suppose I've seen more insanely priced items on ebay before.

[AF6LJ]

Well lets see...
Turbo pump spins at tens of thousands RPM Said pump gets jarred and suffers an impeller crash....
and the guy wants what???

As far as the guy who has the good one who keeps taking off the end caps and contaminating it......
Shame there is no place you can send him to read about the Care and Feeding of High Vacuum Systems.   

/Sue who is looking for a way to grow a third arm and hand.
Besides being generally useful this is a triple face palm moment.

[nfmax]

They describe them as hard vacuum systems for a good reason. It's been many years since I had to deal with one, fortunately

[AF6LJ]

They describe them as hard vacuum systems for a good reason. It's been many years since I had to deal with one, fortunately

Back in the day.. I maintained a pair of helium leak detectors.
(Veeco MS-90 MS-17) They didn't have turbo pumps..
I still keep an interest in the technology...

[PaulAm]

Long ago I worked in a particle accelerator lab and we used a TM pump on the main beam line.  Whenever we had to pump down the line from atmosphere I'd grit my teeth until it came up to speed.  Can't imagine what it would look like inside if it crashed.

Beats the heck out of a diffusion pump; be kind of fun to have one in a small setup.  I rescued the vac system out of an EM at my local scrap yard, so I've had a 6 inch diffusion pump sitting on the shelf along with a backing pump.  I go back and forth about putting it back together and getting rid of it.

[Cubdriver]

Turbo pumps might be more robust than a lot of you seem to give them them credit for being. Way back when I worked for National Semiconductor, we had one sputterer (a Perkin Elmer unit, IIRC) that had a turbo pump.  The sputterers that I worked on had cryo pumps, and most of the other hivac equipment had diff pumps.  I never worked on the P&E sputterer, so the extent of my knowledge of the turbo pump at the time was that it was a mysterious thing that spun insanely fast, and that like the cryo and diff pumps, once it was up to speed and vacuum you gated it off and left it running unless absolutely necessary.

A year later, after that National plant closed, I started working for a small company that made electron microscopy sample prep equipment - small table top coaters, and freeze fracture/freeze etch machines among others, all of which were high vacuum.  Many used turbo pumps.  Few if any had gate valves for them - they were bolted directly to the chamber and started/stopped as the unit was pumped down or vented.  I nearly had a heart attack the first time I vented up the small tabletop coater when I heard the hiss and the shriek of the turbo as it was powered down and immediately vented to atmosphere!

It soon became routine, and nothing to even be concerned about.  The systems roughed through the turbo as it spooled up, and vented it as they shut down.  Granted these were not HUGE turbo pumps (330 and 510 l/s ones being the largest I recall), but they seemed unfazed by this treatment and seemed to live fairly long lives before needing rebuilds, and those were typically for bearings and certainly not crashes.  I can't recall seeing a crashed one in the 4-5 years I was there.

They certainly proved to be tougher than I had initially thought, given the tight clearances and 30-50,000+ RPM speeds they operated at.  (The smallest, a TPH 060, spun at something like 90k RPM!)

For what it's worth.

-Pat

[Alex Nikitin]

As I have to deal with high vacuum systems on a daily basis and these things contain turbomolecular pumps, I've asked one of our engineers about the details of how fragile these are. And the answer is: not that fragile if you know what to avoid, like tilting the pump at full speed of venting it hard to the atmosphere. Apparently it is a good idea to mount the pump with not just a working condition in mind but a catastrophic failure condition too, as a pump rotating at full speed can do quite a bit of collateral damage if not secured well (I've been told a story how a large turbo went through a brick wall when the bearings failed). You can even start the pump in open air just to see if it rotates well, just not to let it speed up (and as these things take minutes to reach full speed even in vacuum you have plenty of time to switch it off).

Cheers

Alex

[VK5RC]

Don't the turbines in dental drill handpiece get to well over 200,000 RPM, and they get tossed around +++?
The tolerances don't need to be anywhere as good but quite a bit of energy.

[rx8pilot]

Don't the turbines in dental drill handpiece get to well over 200,000 RPM, and they get tossed around +++?
The tolerances don't need to be anywhere as good but quite a bit of energy.

I just saw one that can run 370,000 RPM. I believe these are ultra low mass which makes it a little easier but that is rather high on my WOW scale. 370k RPM. 

http://www.kavousa.com/US/Air/Master-Series-High-Speed/MASTERtorque-M8900-L.aspx

[highlux]

I met a gentleman last weekend, come to find out he was a retired amplifier tech, my main area of interest.

We made a trade for a Guitar I had about $600 into.


Here is what I came home with...and everything works and it in excellent condition.

How did I do?     My mentors told me to ease up on gear purchases until I learned more...but this was a temptation I could not refuse.

1. Wavetek Data Multimeter   Model 52
2. Wavetek Multifunction System 680
3. Sorenson DCR60-13a DC Power supply
4. HP 5300a measuring system
5. HP 3311a function generator
6. HP 5314A Universal counter
7. Keithley Instruments 417 High Speed Picoammeter
8. Staco 10l10l variac
9. Monsanto Preset/Variable Time-Base Counter model 104b
10. The 1700B distortion Measurement system
11. Simpson model 229 Leakage current tester
12. Accu test 2.   Plugs into outlet. 
13. BK 501a semiconducter curve tracer
14. Tempo sidekick 7b
15. Systron Donner 6150 Electronic Counter
16. chronetics pulse generator pg-33
17. Acopian rack mounted power supply.
18. HP 3330B automatic synthesizer
19. HP 8640b signal generator
20. Alford slotted line
21. PRD ELECTRONICS INC TYPE 3302-H, 219-H, 3378 AND 1531
22. HP Agilent 809B Waveguide Universal Probe Carriage
23. Fluke 8020b multimeter
24. f-200x illuminometer
25. Genrad 2220 Bug Hound
26. HP 59308a timing generator
27. Datapulse 101 pulse generator
28. HP Agilent Keysight 59307A VHF Switch
29. MICRONETICS NOD 5101 NOISE GENERATOR

[macboy]

Nice haul, highlux. Lots of older gear there, but there are some useful pieces especially for a audio/amplifier guy. The distortion analyzer sticks out. The variac will be useful, and you must have at least one or two good signal generators. The curve tracer may be good for matching transistors for amps, either to get a good matched long-tailed pair for input stages, or for matching other transistors between channels. A pulse generator with fast rise time is a good thing to have to calibrate an oscilloscope's mid and high frequency response, and is good to check that an amplifier is stable and does not exhibit ringing with a step input. The Genrad 2220 Bug Hound may prove useful if you can familiarize yourself with how it works and how to use it to trace faults.

Yesterday I stopped by a surplus store and scored a nice working Tek 2465A 350 MHz 4-channel analog scope for CAD$150 (~USD$110 ), and a Xantrex 6030D (XT 30-2) dual 30V/2A power supply with GPIB for CAD$75 (~USD$55).  I also picked up a 1/2 lb spool of 0.010" 63/37 solder for $5. It's a little thin, I wanted 0.015 or 0.020 but you can't argue with the price.

I certainly didn't need another power supply, as I have far too many already, but I did really want one with GPIB so I could do some automation of battery charging and other tasks. Both work great but need some cleanup. The power supply front panel is horribly yellowed; I will break out my homemade retrobright mixture and UV lamp and see what I can do. I haven't yet tested the GPIB. The GPIB connectors look shiny new and the address dip switches are both set to zero, which indicates to me that the GPIB has never been used.

The Tek 2465A is an example of one of the last and best pure analog CRO scopes. The front panel controls are push buttons and rotary encoders instead of old school clunky switches that the signals actually travel through. It has on-screen readout of parameters (vertical and horizontal settings, cursor measurements, etc). Two strikes against this particular one: no GPIB option, and it's not a 2465B (400 MHz). It quite good aesthetically, but it has some very stubborn permanent marker on the plastics  and one missing control (horizontal vernier), but it is otherwise in very good shape - no dents or cracks. The CRT is OK but not razor sharp, and it could use a contrast filter. I don't know if I will bother with trying to sharpen it. I know some here turn up their noses at analog CROs but I am thrilled to add this one to my bench at a bargain price.