Products > Test Equipment
Tektronix 576 Curve Tracer Adapters
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jonpaul:
Rebonjour NF6X:

Solder: The special silver alloy solder is used on the Tek ceramic terminal strips. A small roll is usually located inside the cabinet.

All the other solder joints are normal 60/40 or 63/37 Sn/Pb solder.

Cover Interlock: It is easy to open the   front porch and short or add a small toggle switch to defeat the HV cover interlock.

Fixtures:  test fixtures, original TEK, DIY acrylic two level  with banna plugs and test sockets.

Last  ... 576 with a typical TO-220 BJT.

Enjoy!


Jon

PS: These decades old TEK have plastic bushings, knobs, control whose plastic deteriorates and brittles, thue easy to break.

Most susceptible are the large contriol for V/H scale, steps, etc the Volts/power selector and the focus/intens
Stray Electron:

--- Quote from: NF6X on February 04, 2023, 06:29:39 pm ---It works!

I temporarily kludged the 10-turn pot to not short out anything nearby, brought the power up with a variac, and tried out a random diode I had laying about. I'm sure there will be things to fix, and I bet I'll need to calibrate everything. But it lives! As I suspected, the readout intensity knob just needed to be turned up to bring the readouts to life. I see some dead "pixels", so maybe I'll need to dig into the readout bulbs?

I'll start ordering necessities like tin/lead/silver solder. I'd like to find one of the safety covers so I don't have to fabricate one from scratch. I have one of the FET adapters sitting my in PO box waiting for me to pick it up already, and I still don't know how the other FET/BJT adapter differs. The only one I see listed is part of an expensive lot of 4 adapters.

--- End quote ---


   That's great news!  You'll like using that lead/tin/silver solder.  I now use that for everything. If you watch E-Greed rolls of the stuff still turn up there occasionally that don't cost both arms and both legs. My CT is missing the safety cover and someone installed a bypass switch on it and I'm satisfied using it that way.  If I allowed some ignorant parts-changer monkey to use the CT then I would be more worried about the missing cover but I learned LONG AGO not to touch any circuit under power.
NF6X:
Those are some nice shop-made adapters there. I spent some stupid money (again, not adding it up) on several original adapters out of laziness, but I expect that I'll make a bunch more adapters of my own.

I don't think any of the shaft couplings are broken on mine yet. Yet. The display offset knob is not only missing a chunk, but the higher numbers on the clear skirt are smudged to the point of being unreadable. Rather than trying to keep this machine looking factory new, I think I'll upgrade any plastic stuff that I need to replace. I'm not sure what I'll do about the display offset knob, but I have a plan for the broken plastic 10-turn pot mounting cup: I have some brass round bar that is big enough, and I'll turn a deluxe replacement on the lathe at work next week! That part doesn't function as an insulator; the pot shaft is grounded to the front panel anyway by the rectangular plate that goes on the inside of the panel. I'm calling it a cup instead of a bezel now, because I found it in the manual and that is what Tektronix called it. I guess they might have done that because the front panel was too thick to get the turns counter to fit the pot properly?

I'd rather have a functional safety cover in place than routinely bypassing the interlock, but I'll bypass it for some careful testing before I get around to making a replacement cover. I gather from the manual that the early production models had an interlock bypass button? I presume that Tek's lawyers had a fit over that and made them change it.

Johnny10:
There are so many great threads on the 576 on this forum.

And once you get one, you will want another !
NF6X:
I'd think that I'd want a 577 for my second one, with its sexy storage screen.
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