Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[mnementh]

More like bring me 3 eggs... and the hen who laid them.  Hey, a dwagon's gotta think ahead, and there's lunch to cook yet. 

mnem

[mnementh]

Yeah, was thinking about it, or will that need a full sand-back to restain it in the future? I was thinking to give it a clean and a wipe over with a new layer of stain with a rag every few months to keep it fresh?

I'm not much of a woodworker so I'm open to instruction.

Deck/patio exterior stains are meant to be applied/maintained this way. Stains meant for furniture usually dry out quickly and leave the wood exposed unless sealed. Polyurethane is the obvious choice here, but even that will dry out and crack in a year or three left exposed to the sun/elements.

Least assache per instance of maintenance would probably be deck stain every other spring or so; the urethane would in theory be less frequent maintenance.

mnem
 

[med6753]

Yeah, was thinking about it, or will that need a full sand-back to restain it in the future? I was thinking to give it a clean and a wipe over with a new layer of stain with a rag every few months to keep it fresh?

I'm not much of a woodworker so I'm open to instruction.

Deck/patio exterior stains are meant to be applied/maintained this way. Stains meant for furniture usually dry out quickly and leave the wood exposed unless sealed. Polyurethane is the obvious choice here, but even that will dry out and crack in a year or three left exposed to the sun/elements.

Least assache per instance of maintenance would probably be deck stain every other spring or so; the urethane would in theory be less frequent maintenance.

mnem
 

Agree with this. 

[TERRA Operative]

Ouch! Those pins! Those trimmers!

[Robert763]

Looked a some of the haul from Sundays car bootsale.
Mostly good news.
Racal 4009 /1905A is working perfectly including the membrn keypad.
HP 3466A works but function switchs need  clean
Tek P6021 current probe woks fine.
Tek P6046 Differential Probe does not wrk and someone hs been inside it. Fixed  couple of obvious things and the Amp works but the probe does not. Input FETs are OK but I need a clear bench to get into that. On the repair pile.

In the box of Fluke thermocouple probes was a clearly new old sock Fluke 80T-H touch hold probe. Looks like a scope probe with a flaat box on the meter end with three 4mm  pins and a little 2.3mm pin between the V/  and common pins.
Never seen one of these before, wht does it work with? Well, Fluke 8010, 8012 and 8050 bench meters at least. Funnily I'd never noticed the little hole between the input sockets. My 8010 is in storage so I put the prob to one side.
While working on the HP 3466A I noticed it has a small hole between he inpu terminals. I wonder.... So tried the FLUKE touch probe in the HP meter. Not only does it fit, it actually works  A common standard for a special function from two OEMs, Who would of thought? 

[mnementh]

Ouch! Those pins! Those trimmers!

Those vias torn asunder from the parent board!!! 

mnem
Oh, the humanity...    Errr, Oh the TEK-anity!!!

[Saskia]

it's dead, Jim.

I could offer Vince a burdizzo clamp bungard press to fix them contacts ...

[med6753]

Today's small project. Recap of a Type 1A2 plug-in. All 2 capacitors.  Hey...you never know.

The Type 1A2 was the high frequency replacement for the Type CA plug-in. (50MHz vs 34MHz). It has the identical vertical response as the Type CA and is fully compatible with older 500 series scopes.



Caps to replace are C397 and C421.




C421 replaced. Was 25uf/25V. Now 22uf/25V. Didn't have a 33uf on hand. The 22uf measured 23.7uf. Close enough.



C397 replaced. Was 5uf/150V. Replaced with same.



Houston, we have a problem. Channel 1 is fine. Channel 2 is completely dead. Was working before. Obviously yours truly screwed something up. Oh well. I'll get out my custom built plug-in extender, apply same waveform to each channel, and find out what I messed up. More to follow. 

[Vince]

Ouch! Those pins! Those trimmers!

Those vias torn asunder from the parent board!!! 

mnem
Oh, the humanity...    Errr, Oh the TEK-anity!!!

Well I would not have had to show that to you, had you bothered quoting BD rather than me when you meant to reply to him. If you can't even be bothered quoting the proper message...why should I bother about.. anything really ?  So that includes horror pics.  Good thing is, next time you reply to "me" with something unpleasant, I won't even have to reply to it or feel offended, I can just assume you meant to reply to god knows who else instead, and move on. Thinking about it, that's great.

Off to get some groceries now.

[med6753]

OK, I'm prepared. 

[Cerebus]

Yeah, was thinking about it, or will that need a full sand-back to restain it in the future? I was thinking to give it a clean and a wipe over with a new layer of stain with a rag every few months to keep it fresh?

I'm not much of a woodworker so I'm open to instruction.

Tung oil is your friend here. It stands up to the elements exceptionally well and can be freshened up in the future by a quick, very light once over with Scotchbrite and then a fresh coat of oil. The best thing is that it's about as easy a finish to apply as you can find, no fuss about brush strokes, dust sticking to it as it dries, etc., etc. The finish varies from completely natural and timbery-looking to a deep high gloss - the latter needs lots of coats and careful flatting between coats, the natural looking finish requires no work whatsoever beyond just applying it.

First coat mixed 30/70 or 50/50 oil/turpentine (or whatever your local turps substitute is) to encourage the oil to really 'sink in' to the wood. Wipe on with a rag, leave 15 minutes, wipe off excess with a dry rag, leave 24 hours to cure. Second and subsequent coats use neat undiluted tung oil - wipe on, leave 15 minutes, wipe off excess, leave 24 hours to cure. You can put on as many coats as you like. Two is enough for indoor furniture, three or four for outdoor furniture or wet indoor work surfaces. Note, a little goes a long way, you just need to completely wet the surface of what you're finishing, you don't want to leave anything beyond the bare minimum necessary to wet the surface.

I use tung oil for finishing timber for almost everything. It brings out the natural look of the wood, is easy to apply and repair, is food safe (e.g. for finishing wooden salad bowls, food prep surfaces and the like - you could literally drink pure tung oil) and, apart from the very first coat, the process is solvent and smell free.

See recent sagas of Vince's floor and Mnem's smoking rags for important safety warnings about using any 'drying' oil.

[mnementh]

Boring Mundane Everyday Print #313: Camera Battery Door Bungee Bits 

           
Fusion360 Online 3D Viewer

"heh-heh... he said bungee bits... heh-heh... heh-heh..."

I had the idea for this while fumbling with my poor old Sony DSC-H2; I've had this camera for over 10 years and I just can't seem to give up having it on my bench for stuff just like this. The optics on the thing are world-class; it takes amazing macro pictures right to the point of hitting the lens with the subject, and taking pics on the bench, the fact of only being 6MP is actually a help rather than a hindrance; means I can often post without having to resize.

That said... it has suffered being right next to ol' BumbleButt™ for a decade; it's been knocked off onto the floor a time or three, and this family of cameras is known to have a failure where the catches for the battery door break, and the bit that breaks is part of the battery box inside the camera. A fair assache to fix; so I've been using the thing for over a year with a piece of masking tape holding the battery door shut... but today I realized I could replace the tape with a gumband stretched between a screw in the base and the strap loop. So I worked these bits up real quick to make that happen. 

As always; full details and 3DP nerd stats are over on the 3DP thread:

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/3d-printing/3d-printer-yet/msg4191898/#msg4191898

mnem
This 3DP moment brought to you in part by DeadPool-icorn:   

[m k]

Ouch! Those pins! Those trimmers!

Those vias torn asunder from the parent board!!! 

mnem
Oh, the humanity...    Errr, Oh the TEK-anity!!!

Well I would not have had to show that to you, had you bothered quoting BD rather than me when you meant to reply to him. If you can't even be bothered quoting the proper message...why should I bother about.. anything really ?  So that includes horror pics.  Good thing is, next time you reply to "me" with something unpleasant, I won't even have to reply to it or feel offended, I can just assume you meant to reply to god knows who else instead, and move on. Thinking about it, that's great.

Off to get some groceries now.

Pretty nasty "connector" there.
Round pin is always a bit problematic but maybe an old edge connector with deeply into chassis grooved contacts could do it, if there's still room for slightly rised PCB.
There are also many exotic pin headers, I've learned, and then you'd most likely get the other gender also.

I was once a poor repairing/revisioning jump wire/etc guy and our rules were visually much more strict than the previous error correction blue ones.
Something like a light green wrap wires, follow traces or straight lines and super glue, sort of a make it disappear.
Some positives still, I didn't have those inner level trace cuts where drill holes were curved.

There were also a procedure for almost anything and many cases old PCBs were the only ones.
One rule was that if a brushing comes out you must but a wire in the hole.
Obviously the wire was squeezed flat first and then connected to the trace and then through the hole.
If the trace continued to the other side the wire followed, if not then tail was glued there.
So technically your board, or the other end, is just a bit more work, and not even bad one if alternative is nothing.

A side note,
no wonder those jobs are not exactly mainstream these days.

[mnementh]

Ouch! Those pins! Those trimmers!

Those vias torn asunder from the parent board!!! 

mnem
Oh, the humanity...    Errr, Oh the TEK-anity!!!

Well I would not have had to show that to you, had you bothered quoting BD rather than me when you meant to reply to him. If you can't even be bothered quoting the proper message...why should I bother about.. anything really ?  So that includes horror pics.  Good thing is, next time you reply to "me" with something unpleasant, I won't even have to reply to it or feel offended, I can just assume you meant to reply to god knows who else instead, and move on. Thinking about it, that's great.

Off to get some groceries now.

Good lord, V... prickly much? No offense intended; we've all posted horror pix, and a little good-natured ribbing is usually the expected response. 

I'm gonna imagine that you've been working too hard all morning, and just blame low blood sugar. Here, have a taco... I'm buying, buddy. 

mnem

Neverending Taco Truck sez hi.

[mnementh]

OK, I'm prepared.     

Bite me Lick me, ya ornery ol' smurf-sqweezer. 

mnem
My Karma ran over your dogma.

[Vince]

Ouch! Those pins! Those trimmers!

Those vias torn asunder from the parent board!!! 

mnem
Oh, the humanity...    Errr, Oh the TEK-anity!!!

Well I would not have had to show that to you, had you bothered quoting BD rather than me when you meant to reply to him. If you can't even be bothered quoting the proper message...why should I bother about.. anything really ?  So that includes horror pics.  Good thing is, next time you reply to "me" with something unpleasant, I won't even have to reply to it or feel offended, I can just assume you meant to reply to god knows who else instead, and move on. Thinking about it, that's great.

Off to get some groceries now.

Good lord, V... prickly much? No offense intended; we've all posted horror pix, and a little good-natured ribbing is usually the expected response. 

I'm gonna imagine that you've been working too hard all morning, and just blame low blood sugar. Here, have a taco... I'm buying, buddy. 

mnem

Neverending Taco Truck sez hi.

There is this nice Nixie DMM for sale over here :

https://www.leboncoin.fr/collection/2093068228.htm

Looks cool. Guy even pretends it can measure Frequency ?! Of course that is reasonably common place in modern DMM's, but on older Nixie DMM, first time I encounter that. Obviously given that these old DMM's were basically counters at heart, it does not seem that far stretched to implement at least some rudimentary frequency meter  functionality. It's just that all the ones I have seen so far never had that.

So, I am intrigued.. wanted to check the specs of this meter, find a manual for it, it peeked my interest but.... the ad does not say what brand and model it is 
The quality of the picture is not great, small and highly compressed JPEG. Zooming on it doesn't really help. It's fairly certain there is a " Philips " badge in the top right corner, but what model it is... I don't know.
I tried a few guesses but no luck on Google. The best I can find are modern Philips consumer radio receivers, or waffle irons...

Also, I am just as interested in knowing what is this other DMM, modern, handheld, sitting on the pic next to the Nixie DMM ?
I have never seen that one. It's got 6 digits which I didn't even know existed on handheld DMM's....
It does not look cheap chinese, must be some good brand but I have no idea what. Gossen Metra something ?! Didn't they have a weird exotic industrial design similar to this ? I don't know these meters...

Anyway if someone knows what these two meters are, so I can go get a manual and learn more about them, that would be cool ! 

No, I don't want to bother the seller about this, because I have zero intention to buy his meter. Not that I don't want to, but just that I can not : he sells it for 150 Euros, which is 3 times my "impulse buy budget", he says he won't take no offer, and also it's local pick-up only, and of course he leaves half way across the country from me.
So I don't want to waste his time and make him angry.

I am secretly hoping he might lower the price " one day ", because it's been on sale for 5 months now as you can see so... I keep an eye on it, who knows. Hardly holding my breath though...

[mnementh]

Looks like a MetraHit... maybe an older edition 28C? Current pics have a red knob.

                         

EDIT: Looks likely it's a 28S/29S with the rubber booty.

https://docs.rs-online.com/92d8/0900766b807504d8.pdf

They also made/make a 6.5 digit HH; the 30M. Yumm.

https://www.merniinstrumenti.com/userfiles/files/PDF/Gossen_Metrawatt_katalog_2011.pdf

mnem
 

[m k]

Philips PM 2421 is pretty close.

[Neper]

The manual is here:

https://www.opweb.de/deutsch/firma/Philips/herunterladen/Philips--PM_2421--user--ID10878.pdf

[Robert763]

So having found that the Fluke 80T-H touch probe worked with the HP 3466A, see picture below, I thought I'd investigate further.
The connector has 4 pins three 4mm for 0V, V in and A in plus a 2.3mm pin between the Vin and 0V. It turns out that there is no connection to the 2.3m pin. So how does it work? When you press the button on the probe it connects the current terminal to common.
I don't know how many DMMs use this method. The HP touch probe is the 34112A http://lcweb2.loc.gov/master/mbrs/recording_preservation/manuals/HP%2034112A%20Touch%20Hold%20Probe%20Operating%20Note.pdf
You could make your own version.

[Robert763]

@Vince
GPIB

[tautech]

Unfortunately also the thread where helpful member oldway crossed swords with Simon and despite it being a private slanging match oldway is with us no more. 

Oh yeah I remember IOldway... what a jerk he was when he posted on that 2215 topic to complain about my long posts. I wish him a long and painful death.

That's very uncharitable Vince to a guy that was only trying to help and help he could as his experience was significant.
His only issue was your excellent rambling writeups were hard work for him as English was not his mother tongue and out of frustration he criticized your ramblings then Simon got involved back at a time when he had a hair trigger for the Ban button.
Oldway and I had conversations after he was banned so I know how it all panned out from his side and if nothing else it confirmed how difficult it can be on a truly international forum like EEVblog.

I am still waiting for the replacement brass collet you said you would turn on a lathe with your friend Dubbie, to fix the broken one on the time base know ! Kiwis are all show and no go, promise just promises !

I haven't seen Dubbie for a bit other than know he was getting on with making a family and at last count he was up to 3 and for sure once what was 'his time' is no more ..... ankle biters and all that.

Been 4 years now so I gave up on it   

Ok I don't know how far Dubbie got with the bits I gave him to make the collet and other than not having a something/32" die I probably could've made it but it seems it's no longer required.
No worries, I might see Dubbie briefly at EMEX next week and tell him to ditch that project. 

[nfmax]

So having found that the Fluke 80T-H touch probe worked with the HP 3466A, see picture below, I thought I'd investigate further.
The connector has 4 pins three 4mm for 0V, V in and A in plus a 2.3mm pin between the Vin and 0V. It turns out that there is no connection to the 2.3m pin. So how does it work? When you press the button on the probe it connects the current terminal to common.
I don't know how many DMMs use this method. The HP touch probe is the 34112A

The 1982 -hp- catalogue lists the 34112A as being usable with the 3435A, 3438A, 3465A/B and 3466A. It isn't listed in the 1989 catalogue, the next issue I have

[Vince]

@Vince
GPIB

A thing of beauty, can't wait to receive it !

[mansaxel]

Also, I am just as interested in knowing what is this other DMM, modern, handheld, sitting on the pic next to the Nixie DMM ?
I have never seen that one. It's got 6 digits which I didn't even know existed on handheld DMM's....
It does not look cheap chinese, must be some good brand but I have no idea what. Gossen Metra something ?! Didn't they have a weird exotic industrial design similar to this ? I don't know these meters...

As others have written, it's a Gossen MetraHit. I've got a 25, and what I think is an ABB-branded 14. The 14 is pretty standard, but the 25 and more so the 28 and 30, of course, are excellent meters. They all share a high build quality, good security; mine is Cat IV 600V.

A little 14 pic: (taken when we discussed if cheap lab PSU's can do serial voltage)