Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Cerebus]

When looking at lathe suppliers I can highly recommend ARC Euro trade. Most of these are made to a basic design, quality and extras depend on what the customer (your suppplier) asks for.

These mini-lathes seen to all be made in the same factory in China, with some small variations depending on the OEM they are being made for. For instance, metal rather than PoM gears for the lead screw gearbox, better toolposts, some variation in tailstocks, whether there's a thread dial indicator or not and of course choice of chuck. Perhaps there's a bit of additional fettling and QC that goes on at some OEMs and not at others. Thus as you intimate, who you buy them from is probably the most important factor. In the UK Warco and ARC Euro Trade seem to be among the better sources that I know of.

[Cerebus]

If I expressed my true opinion of this latest moderator intervention I'd get banned for sure.

That, if true, is an unwelcome state of affairs. Being fearful of expressing an opinion for fear of being punished for it is not what we as a society regard as healthy. Indeed, in the real world, bloody wars and revolutions have been fought over the same. Insert obligatory René Descartes quote here.

[Cerebus]

bd are you bidding on the second transistor lot?

Yes and I have a lot of money to burn at the moment so will be bidding completely irresponsibly 

First lot due to be delivered today.

Edit: I'll do a full inventory once I've received both lots (assuming I win the second one) and have moved house. If anyone needs anything, let me know. No Ferengi tactics here

Anders wouldn't be your friend anymore, I assume. 

Depends if he wins or not 

And also whether he's left with booze/petrol money at the end of the melee. 

[mnementh]

Mine has developed the frustrating habit of grabbing multiple sheets and jamming up .................
-Pat

My Oki started those tricks and a Gurgle search maintained it was dirty feed rollers and to carefully wash them with a wet cloth. Of course they weren't dirty as those of us that work with our hands might think nonetheless covered in paper fibers which once removed had it working like new again. 

I did download the manual from somewhere, and have tried cleaning various bits of the feed system with isopropyl, but no joy,  Doesn't seem to be the paper (ran into that years ago at work) as what jams the 5200 feeds just fine in my Lexmark E260dn.  Hopefully the kit suggested by mnem will cure its ills.

-Pat

edit to add - it first started a year and a half ago when I was trying to print out my tax return.  As aggravated as I was with Turbo Tax, the printer has no idea how close I was to going Office Space on it at the time.

The pickup finger (the little cam-looking thing) is made of very soft rubber; it wears. Cleaning with IPA can prolong its life, but not cure one that just doesn't contact properly anymore. The roller wears similarly, and gets a glaze on it that makes it pull paper crooked and cause jams. HP always was very good at this particular little bit of office automation... I wouldn't recommend anything less for any multi-user environment.

mnem

[mnementh]

What are you talking about? My post was about a mod to a bench meter, and all the other discussion has been about visiting a hamfest... all very much on-topic. 
mnem
*SMH*

I think he's refereing to BD139's post above with the embedded video that has no relevance.
It's one thing to reply with a short fun quip, it's another to embed a video as clog up the page.

The phrase "I think" is relevant. I'm too am completely unsure what gnif is referring to[1].

While a detailed explantion would be counterproductive, it would help to indicate in general what prompted the mod's comment, e.g. "discussing clothes" or "OT videos" or....

[1] special case: I dislike vids so much my browser doesn't display the static image unless I examine the DOM - which does happen but is rare

Surely it cannot be the short video in BD's post that brought gnif back into the thread to moderate, or as Dave suggested that it was clogging the page up? I understood that all that is stored on the page is the short URL, the video is still on YouTube's site. The same as when we use photo hosting sites in order to post hi-res pictures without taking up vast amounts of Dave's storage space 

So I can only conclude it was all the chatter about hamfests and what kit to pack to prepare for the ever-changing weather, which while not technically on topic, it is closely related seeing as that is where many of us actually acquire much of our test equipment from as fixer uppers. Or could it be that we have a whistle-blower in our midst who is attempting to mould the thread into their perceived view of what it should be like, despite the topic being discussed is clearly being participated in and enjoyed by many other members.  So with that in mind, if moderators really feel the need to keep stepping in and moderating, it would most helpful to everyone if they were to take a few extra seconds and explain their actions a little more.

As one of the members who have been on this thread almost from its birth, I'm really struggling just to see why it is that the moderators have even been involved in this thread as we have, IMO, self policed it very effectively and as such, it does not seem to be deterring new members joining at all and the number of daily posts is on the up all the time which is surely just what advertisers (sponsors) want to see as it maximizes their exposure to members.

But that's the thing... it most definitely is on topic, technically AND implicitly. This is not a TE thread... the eevBlog forum is literally made of various TE threads; just oodles of them. The emphasis here is on the Anonymous part, and the addiction to TE.

The entire discussion at hand was about braving inclement weather to go to various hamfests in the UK, and bd139's little clip was expressly about showing the kind of foul weather they're talking aboot. How can anything be more on-topic than that?

mnem
 

[factory]

@factory

Why won't they allow you to purchase the items that they are effectively junking, it makes zero sense to me at all.

At one company I worked for they had auctions where surplus equipment was sold off to employees. They abandoned them because there were complaints from people on other sites that they hadn't had a sniff of it, and the accountants found it hard to get the proceeds into the company. I was told that what happened after then was that it was sent to another part of the company overseas to be disposed of, and it was off their hands.

The cost of this stuff is nothing in terms of the finances of the company, and they'd rather get rid of it and have no accounting problems and moaning over fairness.

The last lot of custom built test rigs went in a skip, other sites have been offered the TE stuff, most of it is so old that they didn't want it (i.e. 25+ years old), or likely to have problems due to how old it is. The odd item has vanished, such as the incomplete Ersa SMD rework station I mentioned. No other employees at our site are remotely interested in old electronic stuff as a hobby, but the shelving it's on would be of interest to lots of employees.
Only that guy from maintenance, that got caught ePaying the PAT machine & some AVO 8s (when they were still worth something) has managed to buy TE stuff. Many years before that they stopped selling 'working' stuff to employees, after someone claimed for a replacement PC after it failed. I've also heard stories of large non TE stuff being damaged with hammers, or bits melted with oxyacetylene, to prevent competitors making use of it.

David

[Cerebus]

A temporary cure for that roller glazing might be to clean it with MEK (Methyl Ethyl Ketone). It's sold to the offset litho printing trade as "blanket restorer", the "blanket" in question just being the replaceable rubber blanket that wraps around the offset cylinder in an offset press. MEK will remove glazes that have formed and also causes the rubber to swell slightly, bouncing it back to its original height.

MEK is a solvent to be used very cautiously because there are very few plastics it won't dissolve and very quickly at that. It's fine on natural rubber and polyalkanes (polythene et al), but it'll quickly make a mess of polystyrene, dissolve or solvent craze PC and PMMA, eats ABS for breakfast and so on.

[factory]

Well that was ridiculously easy. Testors black enamel model paint.     

You have to wonder what went down when these HP's were first released with jacks all the same color. 

I imagine a good deal of HP techs at the time flabbergasted that one of their products with polarity sensitive jacks all of the same color could make it to the marketplace. Any old chaps here know about any cooler dispenser chat from those times ?   Seems like the dumb shit Chinese have become famous for............

It is my understanding that the reasoning was that these meter inputs are isolated from GND, therefore the LO side should not be assumed to be negative, or even the negative-most point in a particular circuit.

This is why they are labeled HI and LO for "point of highest positive potential" and "point of lowest positive potential" under test. Also why there's a max V differential compared to GUARD/GND.

mnem
 

There is a precedent with the 410C, where the "common" lead is floating, at least for the DC ranges.
The DC probe is black, but the (permanently connected) lead is grey!
The 410C has a switched position for reading either +ve or -ve wrt common.

That is the probable enviroment where the red/red decision was made.

Some other manufacturers (can't remember who ---too old!) used white or yellow for a non grounded common.

The HP jacks being the same color, or different colors, seemed to vary a lot on both DVM/DMMs & PSUs over the years, it might have depended on the site/country it was made at too. The really early stuff had bare metal jacks, such as the 404A voltmeter that is on the bench at the moment.

David

[mnementh]

Had that at a couple of companies I worked for. Fairly normal. The company I work for at the moment shredded 15x new unused 16" i9 macbook pros a couple of months under the same guise 

Just been informed my transistor lot is out for delivery via Herpes. Hopefully they won't throw it on my roof or something 

Current corporate policy, they won't tell me why, just they won't sell to employees ATM. Might be due to change of company name, or the previous guy that did the scrap orders left & the replacement hates everyone, your guess is as good as mine. 
I couldn't take all of the redundant kit anyway, as the scrap policy is for "personal use only", no selling/trading it on.

bd are you bidding on the second transistor lot?

David

When I worked for the ISD, the reasoning was pretty simple and clear: conflict of interest. As we were the ones who could condemn a bit of kit, there was obvious motive to condemn gear simply because we wanted it for ourselves or to sell.

As a result, we were required to submit an item or lot to the head warehouse manager, who would, if the item or lot passed scrutiny, put said item up on the monthly liquidation auction and we could bid on it as could any other employee or licensed reseller or member of the public with a bidding permit, which process was dead-easy, and we as employees had to get the same permit.

Those fleet MacBook Pros present a clear chain of custody and corporate sabotage/espionage concern: As the HDD cannot be easily removed and destroyed separately, they are a massive network security risk. The corporate image used to make them ready for use will contain a lot of confidential information about how the corporate network is configured even if they've never been used... information which can easily be figured out and used by ne'er-do-wells to find exploits in the network.

Even if they were willing to pay an experienced tech to remove the SSD (presuming it is separate from the mainboard), then you have very easily circumvented Chain of Custody concerns because the person doing the removal is a tech, not a bean-counter. Bean-counters do not like this. They (well, some of them) will happily spend a afternoon pulling and counting HDD caddies and take them to the shredder; not so much watching a tech do the same thing.

EDIT: Remember too... a school district is a public service. Their mandate is to provide transparency and service to the public, so will have to put up with such complex surplus equipment liquidation procedures. A corporation is under no obligation to do so.

mnem
Everything in corporate structure is about boiling things down to a procedure that any monkey can perform. That way almost any employee can be easily replaced by another monkey, and there's no need to pay anybody but management real money.

[factory]

Nope... the ESR60 I had in my repair shop in Florida warned of no protection right on the front of it. There was some aftermarket hackery made to give some small measure of protection, which I suppose PEAK/ATLAS might have adopted as a revision... but key point is it did not have the isolation relay in the frontend to keep the measuring bits out of circuit until the cap was safely discharged that the ESR70 and later had.

After that, no interest in the ESR60 under any circumstances. I know that if I did dare to buy one, it would probably be mine (or the same exact version) come back around on the great wheel to bite my scaly dwagon arse after unloading it on the Bay of Fleas. 

mnem
 

I think that you might find that the model you worked on or saw in that repair shop was a very early model, they certainly do have protection now, and they carry out controlled discharging before doing test.

No, it was mine, I used it every day. I also repaired it several times after blowing it up.

Like I said... if I were to ever allow that thought the merest possibility of the slightest chance of even daring to imagine crossing my mind, I know that Murphy would somehow make me suffer.

All y'alls kin keep yer ESR60. I'm not interested in anything less than the ESR70Gold or maybe a DCA75Pro ATM. I certainly wouldn't give almost 50 quid (the listing in question) for a used one of unknown provenance.

mnem
 

I'm surprised they didn't change the model number if the oldest ESR60 didn't have the voltage check & discharge function. Mine was second hand a few years ago, but looked in almost new condition when I got it. I believe they sell replacement cases, so an old might not have this function, oh and it's limited to +/-50V for the auto discharge function.


The DCA75 was bought new, because second hand prices seemed almost as much as buying a new one at the time.

David

[bd139]

There were definitely two versions. Perhaps everyone blew up their original one.

How are you finding the DCA75? I have a lot of transistors incoming which it might be useful for 

[mnementh]

bd are you bidding on the second transistor lot?

Yes and I have a lot of money to burn at the moment so will be bidding completely irresponsibly 

First lot due to be delivered today.

Edit: I'll do a full inventory once I've received both lots (assuming I win the second one) and have moved house. If anyone needs anything, let me know. No Ferengi tactics here

Anders wouldn't be your friend anymore, I assume. 

Depends if he wins or not 

Especially not if he wins but you drive the price up to a painful $$ by "bidding completely irresponsibly". 

mnem
All's fair in love, war and eBay bidding.

[Robert763]

A temporary cure for that roller glazing might be to clean it with MEK (Methyl Ethyl Ketone). It's sold to the offset litho printing trade as "blanket restorer", the "blanket" in question just being the replaceable rubber blanket that wraps around the offset cylinder in an offset press. MEK will remove glazes that have formed and also causes the rubber to swell slightly, bouncing it back to its original height.

MEK is a solvent to be used very cautiously because there are very few plastics it won't dissolve and very quickly at that. It's fine on natural rubber and polyalkanes (polythene et al), but it'll quickly make a mess of polystyrene, dissolve or solvent craze PC and PMMA, eats ABS for breakfast and so on.

MEK is alos highly volatile and flammable. Two incinents I had direct knowedge of:
 40 + years ago. Accountant at work asked my boss for some MEK  (think it was to clean something on a musical instrunet , the wrer part-time performers ttogether. Boss gave him some in a glass pill bottle with foil lined seal in the thermoset (probably urea-formaldehyde) cap. Accountant came back about 10 minutes later with a bloddy face and wet trousers. He had stopped by the toilet on the back to his office. He put the container on the top of the urnial where it exploded reslting in a face full of glass shards and urine over his trousers. He was not happy. The thin glass bottle had perssurised dut to his holding it in his hand and finally gave up the fight at the wrong moment. He was lucky not to get it in his eyes.

25+ years ago. A cleaner was warned about using MEK to clean trim in a aircraft cabin undergoing a refit. He carried on and one crisp frosty morning his rag burst into flames from static discharge. He promptly dropped the rag AND the cup of MEK starting a significant fire. We got it put out but there was significant damage to the new interior. It could have been much worse. The aircraft was in the hanger with no ready access to tow it out due to other aircraft on jacks.....
Fortunatly there was a huge (about 100kg) CO2 trolly extingusher in the hangar and that put it out.

So if using MEK on your TE be very careful of fire.
 

[Saskia]

AAA beer crate:


Some other stuff I have been up to ...


about to pick up an RTX 3090 to test its performance as a heater for my upper floor. I would not currently go for NG heating up there. Even though I just received another note about juice price increase. Now at 56 c/kWh. This is bloody insane.

[Zenith]

The last lot of custom built test rigs went in a skip, other sites have been offered the TE stuff, most of it is so old that they didn't want it (i.e. 25+ years old), or likely to have problems due to how old it is. The odd item has vanished, such as the incomplete Ersa SMD rework station I mentioned. No other employees at our site are remotely interested in old electronic stuff as a hobby, but the shelving it's on would be of interest to lots of employees.
Only that guy from maintenance, that got caught ePaying the PAT machine & some AVO 8s (when they were still worth something) has managed to buy TE stuff. Many years before that they stopped selling 'working' stuff to employees, after someone claimed for a replacement PC after it failed. I've also heard stories of large non TE stuff being damaged with hammers, or bits melted with oxyacetylene, to prevent competitors making use of it.

David

I think it's fairly common for companies, especially larger and more bureaucratic ones, to not want to sell off surplus equipment to employees. It makes less waves administratively.

Sometimes they've started with a fairly relaxed policy on scrapping things and letting employees get their hands on them. Then they've found it's been abused, say by people scrapping things which are far from worthless, and taking them home and selling them. Then they clamp down completely.

[mnementh]

When looking at lathe suppliers I can highly recommend ARC Euro trade. Most of these are made to a basic design, quality and extras depend on what the customer (your suppplier) asks for.

These mini-lathes seen to all be made in the same factory in China, with some small variations depending on the OEM they are being made for. For instance, metal rather than PoM gears for the lead screw gearbox, better toolposts, some variation in tailstocks, whether there's a thread dial indicator or not and of course choice of chuck. Perhaps there's a bit of additional fettling and QC that goes on at some OEMs and not at others. Thus as you intimate, who you buy them from is probably the most important factor. In the UK Warco and ARC Euro Trade seem to be among the better sources that I know of.

Yes, please get you one of these. That way I can come visit and mug you for it. 

mnem
"please, please unka Cerebus... can I come over and play...?" 

[Saskia]

The last lot of custom built test rigs went in a skip, other sites have been offered the TE stuff, most of it is so old that they didn't want it (i.e. 25+ years old), or likely to have problems due to how old it is. The odd item has vanished, such as the incomplete Ersa SMD rework station I mentioned. No other employees at our site are remotely interested in old electronic stuff as a hobby, but the shelving it's on would be of interest to lots of employees.
Only that guy from maintenance, that got caught ePaying the PAT machine & some AVO 8s (when they were still worth something) has managed to buy TE stuff. Many years before that they stopped selling 'working' stuff to employees, after someone claimed for a replacement PC after it failed. I've also heard stories of large non TE stuff being damaged with hammers, or bits melted with oxyacetylene, to prevent competitors making use of it.

David

I think it's fairly common for companies, especially larger and more bureaucratic ones, to not want to sell off surplus equipment to employees. It makes less waves administratively.

Sometimes they've started with a fairly relaxed policy on scrapping things and letting employees get their hands on them. Then they've found it's been abused, say by people scrapping things which are far from worthless, and taking them home and selling them. Then they clamp down completely.

over here it is a tax issue. tax wise, even if they give it to employees, they will have to pay taxes for them and the employees will have to pay taxes for benefit in kind. So it is way cheaper to scrap it. What this does for equipment reuse is something completely different ...

[mnementh]

AAA beer crate:   

...I just received another note about juice price increase. Now at 56 c/kWh. This is bloody insane.

Print looking much better. Much less stringing and blobbing. I meant to post about that... it looked to me like damp filament and a wee bit of underextrusion. The underextrusion can be fixed by finding the right mix of temp (increase in 5° steps to no more than 220° for PLA) and increasing the flow rate a bit.

Alternately, if the problems are caused by micro steam explosions from wet filament, you can dry your filament by putting in a food dehydrator or some convection ovens/air fryer at ~120-140°F/55-60°C for 4-6 hours. Makes a world of difference in the quality of your prints.

As for the juice bill: Yup... it appears that big energy/big oil are filling the war chest for the next rounds of elections... and I don't believe said war will be fought on a single front at a time as has mostly been the case for the last 40 years, but rather now an all-out global offensive. I fear for my kids and the future. That is all I'm going to say on this subject.

mnem
We now return you to your regularly scheduled insanity.

[factory]

Usagi is using here one boat anchor of a scope and I think, it's not a Tek one:

https://youtu.be/ryBe6NTYSe0?t=627

Edit:

Found the restoring video of this thing: it is an HP 150A:

Thanks for posting that, I did watch the first part some time ago and skipped through most of it, as sanding & painting it was not very interesting to me, plus he painted the wrong color. 

Watched the other three parts last night, much better, although I was surprized the HV section didn't get repaired first, the remaining oiled filled Sprague 6kV capacitors were all leaking hazmat oil in my 150A, most had been changed in the past, now all replaced with modern axial caps from Justradios in Canada, surprized he had trouble finding any.
Still not refitted the HV section, I had health problems & it was put to one side at the time, now can't get to the 150A and probably won't be able to complete it till I move house.




Can't find an after picture of the transformer section.


The second one, the 150AR, not much left of those dodgy caps, just an end cap left, I have a set of new axial caps to rebuild this too, just hope the 5AMP7 CRT hasn't gone to air, due to rusting of the connections.



David

[Cubdriver]

Mine has developed the frustrating habit of grabbing multiple sheets and jamming up .................
-Pat

My Oki started those tricks and a Gurgle search maintained it was dirty feed rollers and to carefully wash them with a wet cloth. Of course they weren't dirty as those of us that work with our hands might think nonetheless covered in paper fibers which once removed had it working like new again. 

I did download the manual from somewhere, and have tried cleaning various bits of the feed system with isopropyl, but no joy,  Doesn't seem to be the paper (ran into that years ago at work) as what jams the 5200 feeds just fine in my Lexmark E260dn.  Hopefully the kit suggested by mnem will cure its ills.

-Pat

edit to add - it first started a year and a half ago when I was trying to print out my tax return.  As aggravated as I was with Turbo Tax, the printer has no idea how close I was to going Office Space on it at the time.

The pickup finger (the little cam-looking thing) is made of very soft rubber; it wears. Cleaning with IPA can prolong its life, but not cure one that just doesn't contact properly anymore. The roller wears similarly, and gets a glaze on it that makes it pull paper crooked and cause jams. HP always was very good at this particular little bit of office automation... I wouldn't recommend anything less for any multi-user environment.

mnem

Mine has been double feeding.  Not certain exactly how, as it has been a long time since I looked at it, but the jam I’d be clearing would be overlapping pages part way through the paper path.  Will try firing it up later to play and try to determine exactly what’s happening.

-Pat

[Vince]

Hay, Vince, did you have any success swapping out that VFD in your Fluke 8845A

I think you must be mistaken ! 

... as I don't own this meter nor do I plan or have ever done VFD replacements... I am not your man !

[mansaxel]

Now at 56 c/kWh. This is bloody insane.

Do you pay hourly rate or is it a generic high level? The peak prices were around those levels today, or even a bit higher, in SE4, the southernmost part of Sweden. Thankfully, we're in SE3, which is a little bit cheaper. (source: Nordpool)

I'm very much on the fence as to how I'm going to tackle next 12-month period; which agreement model I'm choosing, fixed, semi-rigid or full-floating. Full-floating requires instrumentation and some consumer control too. Tempting but do I have the drive to fix it what with the other 100s of things I need to do?  As someone wrote; "The dream of renewables in Germany mostly was natural gas through NordStream..."

Topic discussion: Old TE is energy inefficient. Having large power costs influences the Addiction. Besides, electricity is sort of on-topic.  I hope.

Tangent: When people say they're "full-stack" developers I ask them about their opinions on mains protection, whether they prefer Diazed or MCB's. When their eyes glaze over, I point out that the full stack, for all realistic values of full stack, starts at the transfer switch between commercial and backup power.

This rarely is popular. But hilarious.

[bd139]

Ok so who outbid me at £87? Congratuations if you did  .

[AVGresponding]

idk wtf is going on, I bid 88.88, which was the winning bid, but somehow I'm not the winner? Fuck ebay, I'm done.

[bd139]

There’s some new eventual consistency thing going on with it. Hold off for a few mins while it resolves who the winner is.