Everyone Needs A 1950s Signal Generator In Their Life

July 2, 2024 by Jenny List 8 Comments

At Hackaday, we comb the world of tech in search of good things to bring you. Today’s search brought up something very familiar, [Jazzy Jane] has an Advance E1 tube signal generator, the same model as the unit on the shelf above where this is being written. It’s new to her, so she’s giving it a teardown and fixing any safety issues before powering it on.

For a 70+ year old unit, the quality of these instruments was such that they remain useful and reliable to this day. Unsurprisingly a few things need looking at, such as an aged mains lead and a pair of filter caps in the power supply which haven’t aged well. These parts failed on the E1 here too, and while she’s taking the time to order appropriate replacements we have to admit to being cheapskates and robbing parts with an appropriate working voltage for ours from a nearby PC power supply.

Where this one becomes rather interesting is in an extra switch and socket. It’s a wafer switch with a load of capacitors, and the best guess is it provides some adjustability for the inbuilt audio oscillator which had a fixed frequency on stock models. This is part one of a series though, so we’re looking forward to finding out its purpose in the next installment. Take a look at the video below the break, and if that’s not enough, we seem to have had more than one piece of vintage British test equipment here of late.

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Retrotechtacular: Office Equipment From The 1940s

November 23, 2021 by Chris Lott 15 Comments

If you can’t imagine writing a letter on a typewriter and putting it in a mailbox, then you take computers for granted. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. More niche applications begat niche machines, and a number of them are on display in this film that the Computer History Archives Project released last month. Aside from the File-o-matic Desk, the Addressograph, or the Sound Scriber, there a number of other devices that give us a peek into a bygone era.

One machine that’s still around, although in a much computerized form, is the stenograph. Not so popular these days is the convenient stenograph carrier, allowing a patient’s statement to be recorded bedside in the hospital immediately after a car accident. Wire recorders were all the rage in 1947, as were floppy disks (for audio, not data). Both media were used to time-shift dictation. Typing champions like Stella Pajunas could transcribe your letters and memos at 140 WPM using an electric typewriter, outpacing dot matrix printers but a snail’s pace compared to a laser jet.

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Electrolytic Capacitor Repair

December 24, 2015 by Al Williams 18 Comments

If you’ve ever worked on old gear, you probably know that electrolytic capacitors are prone to failure. [Dexter] undertook a repair of some four-decade-old capacitors in a power supply. He didn’t replace them. He fixed the actual capacitors.

The reason these units are prone to fail is the flip side of what people like about electrolytics: high capacitance in a small package. In a classic parallel plate capacitor, the capacity goes up as the distance between the plates shrinks. In an electrolytic, one plate is a rolled up spiral. The other plate is conductive fluid. The insulator between (the dielectric) is a very thin layer of oxide that forms on the spiral. Over time, the oxide degrades, but this degradation repairs itself when using the capacitor. If the capacitor isn’t powered up for an extended period, the oxide will degrade beyond the point of self-repair.

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How To Tell If You’re Installing Foil Capacitors Backwards

May 20, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 27 Comments

It only takes one mistake to realize electrolytic capacitors have a polarity, but if you’re working with old tube gear, tube amps, or any old equipment with those old orange dip, brown dip, or green dip foil capacitors you also have to watch your polarity. These old caps were constructed with a foil shielding, and there’s always one side of these caps that should always be connected to the chassis ground. If you don’t, you’re going to get interference – not something you want in an amplifier circuit.

Old caps that have long since given up the ghost usually have a black band designating whatever side of the cap the ‘foil ground’ is. This is the side that should be connected to ground. If you look at modern foil caps, you might also see a black band on one side of the cap, which should – if we lived in a just world – also designate the foil ground. This is not always the case.

To properly test foil caps and determine which side should be closer to ground, you can construct a small tester box that’s more or less an h-bridge with a single switch and a pair of alligator clips in the middle. Connect the cap to the clips, put the output of the circuit in your scope, and flick the switch: the direction that has the least amount of interference is the denotes the foil ground of the cap. Replace those old caps in your vintage equipment with a new, correctly oriented cap, and you’re well on your way to having a great sounding amplifier.

Video below.

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