We love our vices. They hold pipes for us to saw away at, wood while we carve, and circuit boards so that we can solder on components. So we keep them in shape by cleaning and greasing them every now and then, [MakeEverything] went even further. He found a 100-year-old vice that was in very rough shape and which was going to be thrown out and did a beautiful restoration job on it.
It was actually worse than in rough shape. At some point, one of the jaws had been replaced by welding on a piece of rebar where the jaw would normally go. So he made entirely new jaws from solid brass as well as the pins to hold them firmly in place. We applaud his attention to detail. After removing all the old paint and corrosion, he painted it with a “hammered” spray paint to give it a nice hammered look. Though when he made the raised letters stand out by applying gold paint to them using an oil-based paint marker, we felt that was just showing off. The result is almost too gorgeous to use, but he assures us he will use it. You can see his process, as well as have a good look at the newly revived vice in the video below.
Readers with not too many years under their belts may recall a time when the classic background sound effect for radio and television news programs included a staccato mechanical beat, presumably made by the bank of teletype machines somewhere in the studio, clattering out breaking stories onto rolls of yellow paper. It was certainly true that teletypes were an important part of the many communications networks that were strung together over the 20th century, but these noisy, greasy beasts had their day and are now largely museum pieces.
Which is exactly where the ancient Model 19 Teletype machine that [CuriousMarc] and company are restoring is destined. Their ongoing video series, six parts long as of this writing, documents in painstaking detail how this unit worked and how they are bringing it back to its 1930s glory. Teletypes were made to work over telephone lines with very limited bandwidth, and the hacks that went into transmitting text messages with a simple 5-bit encoding scheme are fascinating. The series covers the physical restoration of the machine, obviously well-loved during its long service with the US Navy. Of particular interest is the massive power supply with its Thyratron tubes and their mysterious blue glow.
The whole series is worth a watch if you’re even slightly interested in retrocomputing. We’re particularly taken with the mechanical aspects of these machines, though, which have a lot in common with mechanical calculators. [Al Williams] recently covered the non-replacement of the power supply caps for this unit, which is an interesting detour to this restoration.
Many of us have aspirations of owning a tube amp. Regardless of the debate on whether or not tube audio is nicer to listen to, or even if you can hear the difference at all, they’re gorgeous to look at. However, the price of buying one to find out if it floats your boat is often too high to justify a purchase.
A motor transformer
[The Post Apocalyptic Inventor] has built a stereo tube amplifier in the style of the Fallout video games. The idea came when he realised that the TK 125 tape recorder manufactured by Grundig was still using tube audio in the late 60s. What’s more, they frequently sell on eBay for 1-10€ in Germany. [TPAI] was able to salvage the main power amplifier from one of these models, and restore it so that it could be re-purposed and see use once more.
The teardown of the original cassette recorder yields some interesting parts. Firstly, an integrated motor transformer — an induction motor whose stator acts as the magnetic core of the transformer responsible for the tube electronics. There’s also an integrated capacitor which contains three separate electrolytics. The video after the break is well worth a watch (we always find [TPAI]’s videos entertaining).
A new chassis is created out of a steel base plate and aluminium angle, and some neat frames for the motor transformers are made from scrap copper wire bent and soldered together. It looks great, though there’s always the option to use a cake tin instead.
Returning a piece of retro hardware to factory condition is generally a labor of love for the restorationist. A repair, on the other hand, is more about getting a piece of equipment back into service. But the line between repair and restoration is sometimes a fine one, with the goals of one bleeding over into the other, like in this effort to save an otherwise like-new Amiga 2000 with a leaky backup battery.
Having previously effected emergency repairs to staunch the flow of electrolyte from the old batteries and prevent further damage, [Retromat] entered the restoration phase of the project. The creeping ooze claimed several caps and the CPU socket as it spread across the PCB, but the main damage was to the solder resist film itself. In the video below you can clearly see flaky, bubbly areas in the mask where the schmoo did its damage.
Using a fiberglass eraser, some isopropyl alcohol, and far more patience than we have, [Retromat] was able to remove the damaged resist to reveal the true extent of the damage below. Thankfully, most of the traces were still intact; only a pair of lines under the CPU socket peeled off as he was removing it. After replacing them with fine pieces of wire, replacing the corroded caps and socket, and adding a coin-cell battery holder to replace the old battery, the exposed traces were coated with a varnish to protect them and the machine was almost as good as new.
If you’ve been hanging around Hackaday for a while, you know that a large portion of the stuff we publish goes above and beyond what most people would consider a reasonable level of time and effort. One could argue that’s sort of the point: the easy way out is rarely the most exciting and interesting route you can take. We, and by extension our readers, are drawn to the projects that someone has really put their heart and soul into. If the person who created the thing wasn’t passionate about it, why should we be?
To start the process, [Drygol] used metal rods to bridge the areas where the plastic was completely gone. By heating the rods with a torch and pushing them into the Atari’s case, he was able to create a firm base to work from. Additional rods were then soldered to these and bent, recreating the shape of the original case. With the “skeleton” of the repair in palce, the next step was filling it in.
[Drygol] borrowed an intact Atari 800XL case from a friend, and used that to create a mold of the missing sections from his own case. Most of his rear panel was missing, so it took some experimentation to create such a large mold. In the end he used silicone and a custom built tray that the case could sit in vertically, but he does mention that he never quite solved the problem of degassing the silicone. The mold still worked, but bubbles caused imperfections which needed to be filled in manually during the finishing process.
Using his silicone mold and the same tray, he was then able to pour polyester resin over the wire frame. This got him most of the way to rebuilding the case, but there was still plenty of filler and sanding required before the surface finish started to look half-way decent. When he got towards the very end of the finishing process, he used a mold he created of the case surface texture to roughen up the smooth areas left over from the filling process. Add a bit of custom spray paint, and the end result looks absolutely phenomenal considering the condition it was in originally.
Back in the “good old days” movie theaters ran serials. Every week you’d pay some pocket change and see what happened to Buck Rogers, Superman, or Tex Granger that week. Each episode would, of course, end in a cliffhanger. [Keith Hayes] has started his own serial about restoring a DEC 340 monitor found in a scrap yard in Australia. The 340 — not a VT340 — looks like it could appear in one of those serials, with its huge cabinets and round radar-like display. [Keith] describes the restoration as “his big project of the year” and we are anxious to see how the cliffhangers resolve.
He’s been lucky, and he’s been unlucky. The lucky part is that he has the cabinet with the CRT and the deflection yoke. Those would be very difficult to replace. The unlucky part is that one entire cabinet of electronics is missing.
Sometimes the best way to get a hacker to do something is to tell them that they shouldn’t, or even better can’t, do it. Nothing inspires the inquisitive mind quite like the idea that they are heading down the road less traveled, if for nothing else to say that they did it. A thrown gauntlet and caffeine is often all that stands between the possible and the impossible.
Preparing the PCB for epoxy injection
So when [Drygol] heard a friend comment he had an old Atari 800 XL that was such poor shape it couldn’t be repaired, he took on the challenge of restoring the machine sight unseen. Luckily for us, his pride kept him from backing down when he saw the twisted and dirty mess of a computer in person. He’s started documenting the process on his blog, and while this is only the first phase of the restoration, the work he’s done already is impressive enough that we think you’ll want to follow him along on his quest.
There’s no word on what happened to this miserable looking Atari, but we wouldn’t be surprised if it was run over by a truck. The board was cracked and twisted, with some components missing entirely. The first step in this impossible restoration was straightening the PCB, which [Drygol] did by clamping it to some aluminum bar stock and heating the whole board up to 40C (104F) for a few days. Once the got most of the bend out, he used a small drill bit to put holes in the PCB laminate and inject epoxy to add some strength. It’s an interesting technique, and the results seem to speak for themselves.
Once the board was straight, he went through replacing blown passive components and broken chip sockets. All the ICs were pulled and treated to an isopropyl alcohol and acetone bath in an ultrasonic cleaner to get them looking like new again. The CPU was cooked and needed to get swapped out, but otherwise it was smooth sailing, and before long he had the machine booted up. While most would have been satisfied to just get this far, [Drygol] considers this to be the easy part.
He next straightened out the metal shielding with a mallet, sanded it down, and sprayed it with a new zinc coating. The plastic around the keyboard and the metal trim pieces were also removed, cleaned, and refinished where necessary. Rather than going for perfection, [Drygol] intentionally left some issues so the machine didn’t look 100% pristine. It’s supposed to be a functional computer, not a museum piece behind glass.
We’ll have to wait until the next entry in this series to see how he repairs the absolutely devastated case. Any rational person would just use a case from a donor machine, but we’ve got a feeling [Drygol] might have something a little more impressive in mind.
