How great is lockdown?

Trevor Wilson wrote: ================

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** Remember them well, every 60s pushbutton car radio had one - operating in class A with a choke load and a 16 ohm speaker. Usually mounted on a black anodised Al heatsink with no insulators.

One I worked on had special 12V supply valves in the RF stages.

..... Phil

**More treasures:

• An RF Wattmeter. Can anyone make use of it? No use to me. Yours for the cost of freight.

*John Fluke Model 301E Voltage calibrator. No idea what I will do with that thing.

*My stash of magnet wire. Plenty of value in the 50kgs of copper, but it's worth much more for someone who can use it.

Mostly very fine gauge stuff.

More to come, including:

• A fully valved function generator (sine, triangle and square wave). Big sucker. Never been used.

• A twin valve, high Voltage, regulated power supply, with filament supplies. One high Voltage supply is on the fritz. Used very infrequently since I acquired it in the early 1970s.

Except for the 2N301, if anyone is interested in anything, let me know.

**I found some OC28 transistors (mounted on a heat sink), some AD149 transistors and some those ancient, Pommy, black painted glass transistors (OC71, et al).

Loving the lockdown.

FWIW: My first car (a 1959, FC Holden) was fitted with an Astor (Diamond Dot) transistor car radio. I can't recall what the output transistor was (prolly an AD149), but that thing had the sweetest AM radio I've ever had in a car. Excellent sound quality and good range too. Sold the car for $50.00. Shoulda kept it. Prolly worth North of 50 Grand today.

Yup. join the club !!

I might be interested in some or all of the magnet wire, if it complements what is in my existing hoard. If you happen to be able to list the diameters / gauges and general insulation type (formvar / solderable etc), that would help me decide.

By the way I too have some enormous AlNiCo magnets that are in (working) galvanometers from old Texas Instruments chart recorders - (before people started putting servo feedback on the mechanism to drive the pens, so not really competitive with later chart recorders I think). The magnets are about 15cm across IIRC and certainly very heavy. If someone has an interesting use for these, let me know, as I haven't used them after several decades.

Any Holden with a chrome bumper... hell even some of the the plastic bumpered models are starting to slowly move in an upward trajectory.

Probably not. You are making one huge assumption here. You imagine the car would still be in reasonable nick. The reality is that you would more likely; have worn it out: smashed it up: left it outside to weather: ETC. Any number of ghastly fates would likely have befallen that FC. FWIW, it takes quite some effort to keep and maintain a car in good condition for some 60+ years. Most people would only bother with a car that had some cachet *from new*, some rare factor, some novel feature, that ensured it would appreciate in value over time. Sadly, the venerable FC Holden had none of that.

That said, a former work colleague has a 60s Mustang that he's had almost from new as well as a Sunbeam Alpine. The Mustang has been restored once already, I watched his progress on it back in the 90s. The Alpine, I'm told, is out in the weather and suffering from exposure. Both those cars have some cachet.

A friend here bought one of the last Ford XR8s. There were 750 in the last batch and each was individually numbered.

His is not even one of the rare ones as it is in common old Winter White. I guess he's hoping it will appreciate as he isn't driving it - he has an XR6 for a daily driver. The XR8 just sits taking up space in his 2 car garage.

--

Xeno 


Nothing astonishes Noddy so much as common sense and plain dealing. 
       (with apologies to Ralph Waldo Emerson)

**Correct. I plucked a figure out of the air, based on what other cars can fetch. Clearly, the FC (wagon) is not as valuable as I assumed. I know that my brother's 253 V8, VH Commodore is prolly worth around $20k. 'Cause I checked. And I was surprised.

You imagine the

**Yep. Which would be sad. It had no rust! In fact, when I was offered $50.00 for it, I thought I would put into a demolition derby and have some fun.

FWIW, it takes quite some effort to keep and maintain a car in

**True enough. [Anecdote] One of my clients is a (recently retired) financial advisor. He would typically visit me in a shitbox Merc SL450. Then, one day, he piqued my interest, when he rolled up in an Aston Martin DB5 (British Racing Green - of course). He bought it back in 1970 for bugger-all. It was a bit tired, but in good nick overall. He spent $75k doing it up. I checked the value on thing and told him:

"I betcha that DB5 has outperformed any investment you've ever made or advised your clients to make."

He agreed.

He sold the Merc and his daily drive is a new Mustang. Urk.

**Indeed. My mechanic drives a '67 Mustang.

**Hard to know which cars are going to appreciate.

The drummer from Pink Floyd bought a Ferrari 250GTO for 25K ponds with some of his earnings from "Dark side of the moon". Probably worth 1000 times that now.

Yes, "Dark side of the Moon" was/is a great album!! ;-P

--
Daniel

Rate things are going, and with the gov'ment unwilling to impose greater restrictions, we'll be enjoying this lockdown indefinitely.

I'll continue to hide inside my house until at least a couple of weeks after I get my second AZ jab in August.

One thing - my forthcoming delivery of booze turns out to require me to show id which somewhat defeats the non-contact nature of online ordering.

Sylvia.

**They're idiots. Shoulda locked down a week earlier. The half-arsed lockdown is just dumb. **Snap! Mine is due on the 11th Aug.

**I don't drink much anymore.

I had one of those. It was a Motorola.and it worked a treat. Can't remember where I found it but I fitted it into my Austin Maxi in the

1980s. It was made for a positive earth system so I had to insullate the whole thing form the car chassis. My mates couldn't understand why it took half a minute to warm up.

I got 35 quid for it on ebay a few years back. A bloke wanted it for his 1959 Hillman Minx he'd restored..

**"Warm up"? Must have been a valve model. ALL SS ones are instant on. Except for the latest ones that are fitted with 15 microprocessors.

You think I'm joking? I flattened the battery in my 2018 Subaru and, due to a f*ck-up with jump starting the thing, I managed to shut down all the safety systems. I took it to my mechanic, who placed his OBD-II machine on the car. It reported the prescence of 27 microprocessors. BY my reckoning my Suby has about a billion times more computing power than a space shuttle.

That's a low number by todays standards but that's unsurprising for a Subaru. When I did the Holden Vectra training around 2003 or so that model already had around that many.

BY

Not really. Each module contains it's own "computer" and they communicate over the CAN-BUS. Many of these are typically pretty low power in terms of computing power. There is one for pretty much everything these days.

**Really. That surprises me. I had the in-laws' 2001 Vectra here for a bit, as they wanted it sold. It was less sophisticated than my VP Commodore (admittedly, optioned to Calais level). Unless, of course, they did a radical re-fit of the Vectra by 2003. **True enough. Bloody things are everywhere. They're so cheap and so powerful, manufacturers can't help themselves. When I built an intermittant wiper attachment for my Escort, I needed a small handful of discrete components (A UJT, an SCR, a potentiometer, a couple of caps and half a dozen resistors). Even back then it cost less than $15.00 to build. I betcha manufacturers use a dedicated micro for the job.

It's cheaper to run power and a data bus everywhere than to run dedicated feeds to everything. Saves copper, saves complexity, reduces interconnects. Plus it allows monitoring. Send a message telling the LH indicators to run, and if you don't get acknowledgement from each one you can report a lighting fault. Etc.

CH

Most likely use PAL chips.

Back when I did a Chrysler dealer course on the Voyager and the Wrangler, pre 2000, they had 15+ computers in each of them then. That number will only have increased since then.

--

Xeno 


Nothing astonishes Noddy so much as common sense and plain dealing. 
       (with apologies to Ralph Waldo Emerson)

The ZC Vectra was a very different beast. It had all the fruit (TCS, ESC, SRS, ABS etc etc) but it also had things like modules for each tail light, headlight, door lock etc. The VP had bugger all computing power, just an ECM and BCM basically. There were different BCM "levels" (for instance high or low) depending on the luxury level of the vehicle but in terms of computing power it had bugger all.

They do and with it comes issues. Like the bloke who attempted to wire up some spot lights on his NP300 Navara and destroyed the IPDM - $300 module from Nissan plus labour...