blast from past

Unions? Or bureaucrats in need of plum jobs?

Don't know. The inspection stations were state run, had long lines, and my Austin-Healy Sprite always failed the headlight aiming test because it was too low for their machine. That's one of the many small annoyances that made me leave.

John

In WV, when I was a kid, it was called a safety inspection. You went to a mechanic shop _of_your_choice_ and they checked your brakes and head and tail lights and gave you a sticker, for like $1. ...Jim Thompson

Thanks for your write up on making PCB's. It's clearly written, and your method works great!

And a second thank you for pointing out that you can use the procedure for labeling panels. Neat. :-)

Ed

Thanks, Tom, excellent! Bookmarked it immediately.

They did that in NY, too. Seems every year everyone failed headlight alignment. "That'll be $20, please."

There is no demonstrable benefit to "safety inspections", except to the mechanic's bottom line.

Till the brake pedal goes to the floor, and the emergency brake does nothing. I've had it happen on three different brands over the last 40 years. Blown brake line, blown master cylinder, and a Toyota Corona that would eject the rear brake pads with as little as 1/8" wear when you had to made a hard stop in reverse. No rear pads meant to emergency break. :(

Others had the steel cable break, and one had the linkage come apart when I pulled the handle.

But you live in the rust belt. I've never had a brake failure... knock on wood.

Most modern vehicles have redundant systems. ...Jim Thompson

Except when the master cylinder goes. I had that happen. Weekend visit to our families while in the army, Volkswagen Rabbit, fully loaded with people and some gear, I was driving. Approached an older exit, the ones that have very short deceleration lanes and sharp turns, pressed brake, felt really sluggish. Shifted down hard, engine screaming, used the parking brake at help, made the turn with screeching tires. The owner (carefully) drove it to a repair shop on Saturday and they found that the master cylinder had a big crack in it.

Most _modern_ vehicles have dual master and wheel cylinders.

Even in times of old :-) I've not had a cylinder crack... sounds like poor maintenance, over or under torquing. I've had the rubber parts start to deteriorate so that you had to "pump 'em up".

Had a clutch master cylinder (280Z) rubber go like that while I was away from the house taking my boys to their soccer matches. Stopped at the foreign car parts place and bought a kit (even came with a hone :-), changed it out at the soccer match parking lot :-)

Tested the anti-skid braking and automatic seat-belt tightening yesterday, a car pulled across in front of me while I was doing around

It was a dual but cracked lengthwise.

Rubber parts are easy to fix. Although sometimes that feels like a rip-off. Once I drove the Saab of a co-worker in Scotland. Almost swiped a gate post when entering the company lot. "Yeah, you continental guys drive on the wrong side, and too fast" ... "No, the brake pedal wimped out". He stepped on it ... phssss ... had brake fluid under his shoe. Not safe to drive. So we borrowed another car, went to the dealer, and they sold us a small bag of rubber parts for a whopping 100 (!) British pounds. I could not believe it.

Yep, there are sometimes just seconds between being fine and being on the way to a hospital, or death.

I think it was around $5... keep in mind though, it was 1980 :-)

My wife is not fond of the automatic seat belt tightening slamming her firmly into the seat... but I assured her that bouncing around, and into things, would be much worse. ...Jim Thompson

Sell, the Saab incident also happened around 1980. I don't even want to know what they'd charge today.

This can be really helpful. Especially if it ain't a car pulling in front of you but a huge wall of metal shows up with the letters "So-and-so Trucking".

So? They still fail. I didn't mention the Opel Cadet that had the hood latch fail. The hood blew up, into the windshield at 55 MPH, and on it's way it ripped the reservoir off the master cylinder, and cut the steel tubing. All the modern designs do is make you cocky, then you die.

Not having much money used to be a big motor to be (technically) creative. I remember tearing apart dozens of old TV sets that my dad hauled in from the trash. The only electronics book I had (and didn't really understand) dealt only in (Ge) transistors, so I didn't have any use for the tubes that the TVs yielded almost exclusively. If

Building what the book mystically called an "astable multivibrator" turned out to be a long-winded, exciting adventure. The schematic called (among some common resistors, of course) for a couple of AC122 transistors and .004uF capacitors. I had neither, and I thought that the circuit would work only with exactly these parts. All I had were some odd four-legged AF series resistors and capacitors with funny non-round values and mostly without units. I don't remember through how many TV sets I had to go until I found the parts that I needed. When I finally heard the faint beep of the finished thing through a set of headphones, I was delighted.

Later on I spent most of my days building random stuff that would blink and/or make noise. I remember having to painstakingly unwind old transformers to get access to long pieces of wire that I used to wire up stuff in my room. Actually it was due to the wire shortage that I discovered the concept of "common" for myself: I needed only three wires to control two remote light bulbs, not for.

I still have somewhere my favourite stuffed animal which sports a huge soldering iron scar from some unfortunate accident. I was a geeky kid in whose life these two items had an overlapping phase that lasted several years.

I never had the patience to venture into the really cool stuff like radio transmitters or big audio amplifiers. Still, back then it was much cheaper to build your own equipment from salvaged or even store-bought parts (except that foy the first years of my electronics hobby I didn't even know that there were stores where you could just buy this stuff! I thought electronics parts were only industrial items sold exclusively to the makers of TV sets).

Nowadays if a kid wants stuff that is loud, lights up or transmits radio waves, he can just go and buy shit for a small fraction of what the components would cost in a retail store. A whole generation lacks, in my opinion, the foundation for a sound electronics career.

robert

My teenage years something like that, I remember going to electrical stores and asking for diodes, getting blank stares :) I used to door knock for old radios to dismantle, sometimes fix by valve swapping. Now I occasionally dismantle old monitors, power supplies, printers, always had that curiosity about how things are built. Was a toy wrecker child, back when those 'friction wheel' cars with sparks (flint on flywheel) were common.

Surely wish I'd kept some of that old radio stuff, museum material that seemed would never run out. Later there were regular Friday night train trips to the city to buy parts from an electronics store (McGraths, Little Lonsdale St. Melbourne no longer about).

Eventually working in the field, losing the hobby for decades.

A friend's son had a birthday recently, I gave him some beheaded LEDs (cut the dome off a LED, make's them look different, idea from a web page linked from s.e.d?) and coin cells, with one LED taped to a coin cell to show how they work, kept the kid occupied for hours -- the simple stuff and imagination still works :) My friend wrote that the simple gift held more fun for his kid than a $200 present.

Grant.