Products > Test Equipment

History of Tachikawa (TMK)

<< < (3/10) > >>

joeqsmith:
The new Panasonic batteries came in today.   I had this meter all apart and the nut for the selector switch was originally held in place with some off white paint.  So I touched that up and painted the tops of my custom sleeves.  The batteries are worth more than the meter. 

I spoke with my wife's brother who had found the meter.  He was surprised I tried to restore it.  As I understand it, it was found in the basement of an abandoned home.  The home was starting to collapse and this is why they were brought in to demo it.  They will normally do a walk thru to check for any hazards and this is when he saw the meter in the basement.  The women who owned the home had passed away in her 90's.  She had never been married and never held a technical position.  How she ended up with the meter is a mystery.   

I never heard anything from the IBM archives, so I am at a dead end. 

The solder work you see is for the most part original.  I was trying to preserve the meter as much as possible.  I didn't mention it in the video but to repair the corner, I used some mylar tape that I basically formed a dam around the inside and outside of the case, after I had prep'ed the plastic.  I then filled this with epoxy and let it set.  Once the tape was removed, I had the basic shape.  Lots of sanding and buffing after that.   I had looked for some old plastic and was going to make a powder to blend in with the epoxy to help color it.   I could not find anything laying around to salvage so I just used three different colored markers to get it somewhat close. 

joeqsmith:
I received a response back from the IBM archives and sadly they had no information on this meter.  They copied their curator.  I provided them with a link to the video. 

The white Panasonic batteries look alright with the white sleeves. 

SeanB:
Not my charger, but the ones built into Siemens Gigaset cordless phones, All of them from the earliest version ( at least from 1990 when we started using some variants of them) do not have good charge termination, and will charge the cells continuously. While a NiCd cell will be quite happy with this charge NimH cells tend to generate overpressure and fail after a year or so, so for those phones that are placed every night to charge they kill the cells in around 9 months, and I have to buy a new set of them. Makes no difference as to what cells I put in, even the original ones die in that time, and I just keep my phone off the charger all the time, placing it on for around an hour every 3 days or so to charge.

Other than that they are somewhat reasonable cordless phones, though I do really miss the old Panasonic KX-P9080 I used to use, even with all the issues it had with really poor flip design, it at least had a 1km range. I kept it going thanks to having a good supply of water and other damaged KX-P 9001 phones to rob case parts, speakers and microphones from, though I gave up eventually on the flap and put in a small switch to act as hook switch, along with making my own antennas for it out of old bits of coax cable. Eventually ran out of spares and RF modules for it though, though the 4 AA cells in the batteries were easy to repack, I just put in high capacity cells, and that rarely gave trouble.

joeqsmith:
2017 to 1990 would be 26 years or 324 month or 36 sets of batteries.  At some point, it would seem ditching the phone would make sense.  Even ditching the OEM charger, buying a separate charger and rotate batteries may have been more cost effective.       

Last Friday, I installed new NiMH batteries in the neighbors cordless phones.  Three handsets with 3 AAA batteries ea.  The old ones are marked Panasonic but made in China.   There are no date codes from what I could tell but I expect the phone was well over 5 years old and there are no signs of any leaks.   

I still use my old Olympus Camedia BA-100 charger along with the original batteries.  These have a date code of 00-11.  Maybe Nov of 2000.  It would be close to the age of the camera.  Like the ones I use now, they reached a point where they would not hold a charge but 17 years without a leak seems pretty good.    That's a pretty low end charger.   

joeqsmith:

--- Quote from: joeqsmith on October 14, 2017, 03:57:41 pm ---I received a response back from the IBM archives and sadly they had no information on this meter.  They copied their curator.  ..

--- End quote ---

I received an email from the Curator Of IBM Artifacts


--- Quote ---... I started with IBM in November 1966.  At that time  I was a field repair person for the Office Products. In My tool bag I was issued a similar meter. 

And that's all the information I can add to your  meter research. ...
--- End quote ---

At least it tells us that IBM did supply meters to their service departments and our little meter may have been built for internal use but how this particular one ended up in the basement of an unmarried lady who did not work in tech, we may never know.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page

There was an error while thanking
Thanking...
Go to full version
Powered by SMFPacks Advanced Attachments Uploader Mod