The Shelves of Obsolete Electronics
Posted: Fri Jul 09, 2010 4:22 pm
Hi,
In another thread, I made mention of the Shelves of Obsolete Electronics. I thought I'd post a new thread on those and my electronics shop, which gets mentioned often around here.
The background is that I have an attached garage on this house, but it is not insulated so is not heated or cooled other than by the fact it has no insulation! So, it's not suitable for housing my electronics shop with it's test equipment that prefers to live under the same conditions we humans do.
My first house had this shop in the heated and cooled basement, and my second house had it all in the attached garage which was insulated and so was fed by the house heat and A/C. One day, I'll insulate this house's attached garage and replace that overhead door with an insulated wall so the E-shop can move out there. The machine tools you see are about to be moved into a detached garage, so once they're out of the way I can blow some insulation into those walls.
But, as it sits now, the Shelves of Obsolete Electronics is the only part of the E-shop that is out there. The rest is in bedroom #3, which we'd like to eventually make into a library room. Ah, plans.
Here is the SOE:
As you can see, it's packed full of boxes full of stuff. Just trying to find what I *know* is out there is often an exercise in frustration. I need to arrange things better and , oh yeah, label those danged boxes!
I mentioned in the other thread that one needs to use the Force when searching the SOE, and I was never trained in the Jedi Arts......
Now, we move on to the bedroom that wants to be a library but is pressed into service as the main part of the E-shop.
In the first shot, we come thru the door. There's a closet on the right you can't see, but there's enough space to open the doors of the closet or the back doors of the equipment racks. That closet is full of other obsolete electronics, but not as old as the stuff in the garage. There are levels of obsolete, you know!
So you'll notice the digital photo processing stuff on the left with the three screens, and a pile of old radios on top of old audio amps and a couple of older plasma screens stacked up there as well. Oh, they all work now as I fixed them, but what to do with ED 42" plasmas these days?
There are shelves with supplies on them in the next shot and a rather complete toolbox. One has to get these old things opened up to work on them and then buttoned back up again!
There are some handheld radios on top there. I make those as a sideline. They used to be high-end public safety radios (GE/Ericsson M-PA) that I wrote some Ham Code for and so they're now super-rugged, high-end ham radios.
Next comes the actual workbench. This is where dead electronics wind up getting their bad parts yanked out and good ones put in. Lots of things, like various soldering tools, lamps, magnifiers and even a 50x stereo microscope are there. That thingy with the keypad on the far right is a battery analyzer, not something out of Frankie's lab.
Ah. This next is the rack of test equipment for all sorts of things. If you think you're on the bridge of the original Battlestar Glalactica, you are. They used all sorts of Tektronix test equipment as props on that show, and many of the items they had, I have. Mine are more than props, though!
There is a cart partly visible in the shot, and also in shot #1. This is where the item is put for testing and then the bad bit(s) are yanked out and moved to the old desk workbench in shot #3 for parts replacement.
So, that's it. Not a huge place to work, but fortunately these days the largest thing I have to work on is a flat-screen display. Oh, you think one of those is large? Well, I used to work on Home Entertainment Centers, which were 25" CRT color TV's with AM/FM tuner, tape deck, turntable, and overly large speakers on each end - and the whole thing was in one very large piece of furniture. Those were so big, the Borg Cube would run away from one! I'll take a flat screen any day over one of those old HEC's!
Hope y'all liked the shots!
Later!
Stan
In another thread, I made mention of the Shelves of Obsolete Electronics. I thought I'd post a new thread on those and my electronics shop, which gets mentioned often around here.
The background is that I have an attached garage on this house, but it is not insulated so is not heated or cooled other than by the fact it has no insulation! So, it's not suitable for housing my electronics shop with it's test equipment that prefers to live under the same conditions we humans do.
My first house had this shop in the heated and cooled basement, and my second house had it all in the attached garage which was insulated and so was fed by the house heat and A/C. One day, I'll insulate this house's attached garage and replace that overhead door with an insulated wall so the E-shop can move out there. The machine tools you see are about to be moved into a detached garage, so once they're out of the way I can blow some insulation into those walls.
But, as it sits now, the Shelves of Obsolete Electronics is the only part of the E-shop that is out there. The rest is in bedroom #3, which we'd like to eventually make into a library room. Ah, plans.
Here is the SOE:
As you can see, it's packed full of boxes full of stuff. Just trying to find what I *know* is out there is often an exercise in frustration. I need to arrange things better and , oh yeah, label those danged boxes!
I mentioned in the other thread that one needs to use the Force when searching the SOE, and I was never trained in the Jedi Arts......
Now, we move on to the bedroom that wants to be a library but is pressed into service as the main part of the E-shop.
In the first shot, we come thru the door. There's a closet on the right you can't see, but there's enough space to open the doors of the closet or the back doors of the equipment racks. That closet is full of other obsolete electronics, but not as old as the stuff in the garage. There are levels of obsolete, you know!
So you'll notice the digital photo processing stuff on the left with the three screens, and a pile of old radios on top of old audio amps and a couple of older plasma screens stacked up there as well. Oh, they all work now as I fixed them, but what to do with ED 42" plasmas these days?
There are shelves with supplies on them in the next shot and a rather complete toolbox. One has to get these old things opened up to work on them and then buttoned back up again!
There are some handheld radios on top there. I make those as a sideline. They used to be high-end public safety radios (GE/Ericsson M-PA) that I wrote some Ham Code for and so they're now super-rugged, high-end ham radios.
Next comes the actual workbench. This is where dead electronics wind up getting their bad parts yanked out and good ones put in. Lots of things, like various soldering tools, lamps, magnifiers and even a 50x stereo microscope are there. That thingy with the keypad on the far right is a battery analyzer, not something out of Frankie's lab.
Ah. This next is the rack of test equipment for all sorts of things. If you think you're on the bridge of the original Battlestar Glalactica, you are. They used all sorts of Tektronix test equipment as props on that show, and many of the items they had, I have. Mine are more than props, though!
There is a cart partly visible in the shot, and also in shot #1. This is where the item is put for testing and then the bad bit(s) are yanked out and moved to the old desk workbench in shot #3 for parts replacement.
So, that's it. Not a huge place to work, but fortunately these days the largest thing I have to work on is a flat-screen display. Oh, you think one of those is large? Well, I used to work on Home Entertainment Centers, which were 25" CRT color TV's with AM/FM tuner, tape deck, turntable, and overly large speakers on each end - and the whole thing was in one very large piece of furniture. Those were so big, the Borg Cube would run away from one! I'll take a flat screen any day over one of those old HEC's!
Hope y'all liked the shots!
Later!
Stan