Bomb Hoist Teardown Shows Cold-War-Era Big Iron

July 17, 2018 by Jenny List 10 Comments

Buying surplus equipment lends a frisson of excitement as you eagerly await the package or crate containing your purchase. Did you buy a hidden treasure, or has some shyster succeeded in unloading a pile of garbage onto you, their mark? [Professor Churls] shelled out $49.99 for a military surplus bomb hoist which definitely falls into the former category. His teardown reveals it to be a beautifully over-engineered piece of Cold-War-era American hardware.

As the package with its extremely heavy contents is first inspected, he reminds us just what a bomb hoist does, it is clipped to an aircraft by ground crew and serves as a small but extremely powerful crane to lift up to a 6000-pound piece of ordnance onto the wing pylon of an aircraft. This particular example dates from the 1960s, and features a 28-volt DC motor coupled to a bulky gearbox assembly on a swivel mount for attachment.

His teardown is extremely detailed, but such is the engineering and complexity of the device you’ll want to read every part of it. The motor is a fairly traditional separately-excited brushed DC design such as you’d expect from that era, but with unusual features such as brushes on pivots rather than a slide. The multiple sets of gears are packed in aged and phenolic-smelling grease, and have unusual features such as stub-form teeth for high torque at low durations. There is even an entirely separate gear train for the hex drive provided so that crews could keep the bombers rolling even when the power was out.

He leaves us with the tantalising information that there is a project awaiting this device, but doesn’t tell us what that might be. We hope we’ll get to see it, whatever it is. Meanwhile it’s great to see that this kind of item can still be found from military surplus suppliers, where this is being written they have degenerated into little more than stockists of camouflage-printed camping gear. Our colleague [Brandon Dunson] lamented in 2015 on the slow decline of the electronic surplus business in his location.

Salyut: How We Learned To Make Space Stations

February 12, 2018 by Steven Dufresne 61 Comments

When you think about space stations, which ones come to mind first? You might think Skylab, the International Space Station (ISS), or maybe Russia’s Mir. But before any of those took to the heavens, there was Salyut.

Russia’s Salyut 1 was humankind’s first space station. The ensuing Salyut program lasted fifteen years, from 1971 to 1986, and the lessons learned from this remarkable series of experiments are still in use today in the International Space Station (ISS). The program was so successful at a time when the US manned space program was dormant that one could say that the Russians lost the Moon but won the space race.

Continue reading “Salyut: How We Learned To Make Space Stations” →

Spy Tech: Stealing A Moon Probe

October 19, 2017 by Al Williams 61 Comments

Ever hear of the Soviet Luna program? In the west, it was often called Lunik, if you heard about it at all. Luna was a series of unmanned moon probes launched between 1959 and 1976. There were at least 24 of them, and 15 were successful. Most of the failures were not reported or named. Luna craft have a number of firsts, but the one we are interested in is that it may have been the first space vehicle to be stolen — at least temporarily — in a cold war caper worthy of a James Bond novel.

Around 1960, the Soviet Union toured several countries with exhibits of their industrial and technological accomplishments. One of the items on display was the upper stage of a Luna vehicle with windows cut out to show the payload inside. At first, the CIA suspected the vehicle was just a model. But they wanted to be sure.

The story is laid out in a CIA document from 1967 that was only declassified in 1994. Even then, the document has a lot of redactions in it. The paper is sparse on how they managed it, but when the exhibit closed — somehow — a group of intelligence operatives wound up inside the exhibition hall alone for 24 hours.

What they found was surprising. While the engine and most of the avionics were gone, the vehicle was the real article. They took measurements and photos, hoping that analysis would reveal more about the vehicle’s performance characteristics.

Here’s where you start getting into the redacted material. The team was able to get something from the probe — probably machine tooling marks — but there wasn’t enough detail to identify where and how they were made. They decided to get a team specializing in this kind of analysis to examine it more closely.

Continue reading “Spy Tech: Stealing A Moon Probe” →

Retrotechtacular: Radio To Listen To When You Duck And Cover

October 12, 2017 by Al Williams 34 Comments

CONELRAD may sound like the name of a fictional android, but it is actually an acronym for control of electronic radiation. This was a system put in place by the United States at the height of the cold war (from 1951 to 1963) with two purposes: One was to disseminate civil defense information to the population and, also, to eliminate radio signals as homing beacons for enemy pilots.

Continue reading “Retrotechtacular: Radio To Listen To When You Duck And Cover” →

Retrotechtacular: [Walt] Builds A Family Fallout Shelter

November 9, 2016 by Jenny List 113 Comments

In the 1950s it seemed likely that the Cold War could at any minute take a turn for the worse, and we might all be consumed in the fiery conflagration of nuclear war. Fortunately neither the leaders on our side of the fence nor those on the other were the dangerous unpredictable lunatics their opponent’s propaganda might have portrayed them as, and instead we continued on our way uneasily gazing at each other over the Iron Curtain.

For civilian America, the Government created a series of promotional efforts to prepare them for the effects of nuclear war and equip them with the means to survive. Some of them like the infamous “Duck and cover” film seem quaint and woefully inadequate when viewed with several decades hindsight, but others tried hard to equip the 1950s American with what looked like the real means to survive.

Our film below the break today is part of one such effort. The Family Fallout Shelter was a booklet produced in 1959 by the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, and it described in detail the construction of a series of fallout shelters of differing designs. There was a concrete underground shelter, a partially buried twin-wall shelter with infill, and the one shown in the film, a basement fallout shelter made from concrete blocks. Our narrator and protagonist is [Walt], a capable bespectacled middle-aged man in a check shirt who takes us through the shelter’s construction.

We start with him giving some friends a tour of the finished shelter, and we see its cozy furnished interior with bunk beds and all mod cons. We’re told it would make a useful extra spare bedroom, or a darkroom. Then we flash back to construction as [Walt] takes us through all the steps required to build your own basement shelter. As he says, it’s a project that could be attempted by almost anyone, and what follows is a pretty good introduction to basic bricklaying. We can’t help being concerned about the security of those unmortared roof blocks in the face of a Tsar Bomba, but fortunately they were never put to the test. We do find it amusing that this is presented by the National Concrete Masonry Association — how better to boost sales than get the populace to build extra brick walls in every home?

The film and booklet provide a fascinating window into some of the culture surrounding preparations for nuclear war in the early Cold War era. The ideas that it would be survivable, and that two weeks in a home-made fallout shelter would be sufficient to ensure that civilians would be safe are in stark contrast to the then-secret deep shelters and long-term survival plans that the governments of the time created for themselves. It would be interesting to know how many of these home shelters were built, and how many survive. Did you ever spend a night in a basement spare bedroom with a blast wall?

We’ll leave you with the film’s closing words from the Director of the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization.

“No home in America is modern without a family fallout shelter. This is the nuclear age.“

Continue reading “Retrotechtacular: [Walt] Builds A Family Fallout Shelter” →

Hacking When It Counts: Spy Radios

August 12, 2016 by Dan Maloney 33 Comments

World War II can be thought of as the first electronic war. Radio technology was firmly established commercially by the late 1930s and poised to make huge contributions to the prosecution of the war on all sides. Radio was rapidly adopted into the battlefield, which led to advancements in miniaturization and ruggedization of previously bulky and fragile vacuum tube gear. Radios were soon being used for everything from coordinating battlefield units to detonating anti-aircraft artillery shells.

But it was not just the battlefields of WWII that benefitted from radio technology. From apartments in Berlin to farmhouses in France, covert agents toiled away over sophisticated transceivers, keying in coded messages and listening for instructions. Spy radios were key clandestine assets, both during the war and later during the Cold War. Continue reading “Hacking When It Counts: Spy Radios” →

Building A Satellite-Tracking System With Cold War Tech

August 6, 2016 by Cameron Coward 11 Comments

The things Hackaday readers come up with and post over on Hackaday.io never cease to amaze us. If you’ve never checked it out, be careful — you can easily spend hours (or weeks) of your life just skimming through the projects that have been logged there. Many of the builds use modern development tools like Arduino and Raspberry Pi, but every so often we come across a project that takes a more difficult road.

That’s the case with [Keplermatik’s] Cold War-era satellite-tracking project, also aptly named Keplermatik. This a build that’s still in progress, which just means you’ve got the privilege of following along as it progresses! What makes this project so special? Aside from the fact that it’s purpose is to track satellites, we think the sole use of vintage tech is a very cool and very ambitious goal.

IV-22 VFD displays will be used for the "Soviet" side of the console — IV-22 VFD displays will be used for the “Soviet” side of the console

[Keplermatik] plans to split the satellite-tracking console into two sides: an American-tech side for tracking the satellite’s position, and a Soviet-tech side for tuning the radio and positioning the antenna. The idea is that he’ll get to use vintage technology from both sides of the Iron Curtain. That should lead to some very interesting lessons about how these kinds of systems were designed by each side during the Cold War.

The build is still in its adolescence, but is definitely worth following along with. But, if you’re craving more Soviet tech and need it right now, be sure to check out this post on Russian Cold War vacuum tubes.