Re: Cheap new device to pull capacitors from?

Me too. My buddy and I would go down to NYC and make a day out of perusing "radio row." For $5 or so we find some high tech piece of equipment to adapt to our needs.

I needed some toggle switches and didn't want to spend the $2.50 a quality switch would cost, down to radio row and I picked up a aluminum panel with ~100 wired up switches on it for $2.

When I was in the city a couple of years ago I went down to wallow in nostalgia, there was one hold-out (remember the smell of phenolic resin plastics and varnish?) all the rest was China Town shops, and one computer surplus store.

The WW2 battleship memorials have that same odor in their radio rooms.

Remember Lafayette Electronics?

I really miss Canal Street

It's been gone so long, most people don't have memories of it, at berst faded memories.

I only know about it from reading in the magazines, some years after it was torn down for the World Trade Centre.

But when I first went to buy electronic parts, 1971, I looked in the yellow pages, and picked one store, I don't remember why I chose it. And over time, I came to see that while it wasn't a "Canal Street", there was a cluster of electronic stores within a few blocks. So Etco, some might remember it because they morphed into a mail order place aimed at the US was the store I went to first, in a building with wooden floors, go down to teh basement and it's jammed with stuff, much of it behind a parts counter, but magazines, and surplus etc. Even in 1972 I could buy a Command Set transmitter for ten dollars there.

There was some place nearby that sold transformers and motors, and the one time we went in the owner snarled at us "what do you want?" and we never returned, but we weren't the only ones who got that sort of welcome there. There was Payette Radio, a big parts store, but it also had a ham radio section, where I drooled over the equipemnt, and bought some magazines. And there was a "new" place, Corenet Electronics, selling mostly semiconductors, especially ICs, and kind of promoting itself like a Poly-Paks, where maybe he did get his stock from.

They were all gone by the end of the decade. Partly I think the transistion to semiconductors, new places came along that better covered those, and the stores would have to have complete makeover of their inventory to be more relevant. But I suspect the rents went up, or if they owned the buildings the offers too good, so they decided it was time to close down. That area has been redeveloped since the first time I was down there.

Some of the other stores, spread around, did live much longer. One even exists today, but when I went about six years ago, it had been renovated and seemed aimed at consumers, rather than hobbyists and repairmen. I think a lot of their stock had been industrial surplus, it was like a grocery store, with aisles of parts and you'd go up and down with your basket getting what you wanted. I'm not sure how much of that they still sell, but if it's there, it's behind the counter. And the wooden floors are gone.

Michael

I visited Canal Street sometime in the 80's and there was one old store hanging on. Had a lot of nice brass wave guides and the usual bins of stuff, but the prices were way higher than in my youth (60's). It was obvious that he hadn't added any new stock in awhile too.

You could buy boards stuffed with transistors in the 60s' and that was the way to buy them since retail they were still in the dollar range. Some were quite a bit more expensive than vacuum tubes.

Poly packs was a joke, and rip-off. They advertised "too many to test, you test em." Somebody had to have tested them because in a pack of 100 you might find 5 functioning transistors, and those probably had high leakage.

BTW are you the Michael Black that had a website with some simple, low parts count, switching regulators?

I remember when Digi-Key and Poly Paks both advertised in the back of Electronics Illustrated, selling apparently the same sorts of stuff.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

No.

It's a common name, there was a time when I'd even bump into "Michael Blacks" in various newsgroups, "it's my name, but I know I didn't post that".

Michael

I don't think so. Poly Paks was around from the early sixties, I think from reading ads it had a different name to begin with, and were selling surplus, even in the seventies they'd have stereo amplifiers boards and calculator boards that obviously had been surplus from manufacturers.

Digi-key started by selling a digital keyer for morse code, and then added some parts that they sold, eventually getting bigger and bigger. They always seemed to be selling new parts, first a limited selection to hobbyists, then as that did well broadening the line, yet still seeming to be fore hobbyists, and then somewhere along the way they got big.

Michael

See pp. 97 & 99 of the PDF.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs