Here is an equipment score I thought might be worthy of posting...
After a family member sent me some pix of three power supplies laying around in his garage (unknown to me for at least ten years), I was
ready to give him one upside the head...
One power supply was an HP6627A and the other two were older HP 6282A 0-10V @ 20 Amp boat anchors !!
I was more interested in the 6627A
"Do you have any use for these
", he asked. What do you think my answer was ?
I took all three. One of the older 6282's was damaged with a broken meter holder and busted neon lamp indicator along with a fair amount
of cosmetic issues. It was a "working spare" according to the label and will remain as that way.
Anyway, the three were covered in dust. The HP6627A did not see much use when the facility it was in closed up shop. It is in near
pristene condition except for some minor scratches on the cover. The faceplate is immaculate. It works great and I am currently in
the process of making a GPIB to PC parallel port interface to control the 6627A with a Visual Basic program.
For those unfamiliar with the 6627A, it has four 40W outputs. Low range is 0-20V @ 2Amps while the high range is 0-50V @.8 Amps
Just about good enough for any experimenting and protyping. This family of power supplies was intended to be used in a production
environment, sending back data to a computer via the GPIB bus. While not intended to be a laboratory power supply, it could be used
as such by punching in voltage and current from the keypad. No big deal.
The 6627A didn't need more than an hour of cleaning. Mostly grime and label removal as well as internal cleaning of dust.
The only mod I made was to the AC fan. It was waaaaaaaaaaaay too loud. In a large building space one probably wouldn't even
notice, but on a bench in a fairly quiet environment... you get the picture. I substituted the original AC fan with a lower volume one which
still moves air but is more tolerable on the ears and nerves. I don't intend to run it at full load capacity so internal heating should not be a
problem. I think there was a thread here at this forum which dealt with an HP power supply from the same family and a concern was the
hybrid power module. I looked at the module and the parts should be easy to obtain if it needs repair. If the module was encapsulated
it would be an issue, but none of them are encapsulated. Here are some pix of my recent score.
The price was "pick 'em up and take 'em off my hands." On eBay the 6627A's are available for a wide range of asking prices. Even a
unit at a low price will cost you big time. It's a heavy piece of equipment and subject to ridiculous shipping charges if you had to have
it shipped from overseas. Also, bad packing techniques could result in damage that wasn't there to begin with. Risky, to say the least.
This is a precision piece of equipment. One probably wouldn't want or need another power supply.
Pictures one shows the unit with cover on.
Pic three is the huge power transformer
Pic four shows two power supply boards attached to the hinged cover. It's easy to remove the output boards.
Pic five shows the hybrid module which should be fairly easy to repair if need be.
Pic six shows the substitute fan I installed in place of the annoying original one...
Well, that's it. I didn't show the boat anchor 6282, but I might if asked. Thanks for looking and commenting if you do.