Test Equipment Anonymous

Well worth the money. Replacing a transformer and even substituting an ADR399 wouldn't be a problem. It's those concentric switches and their knobs that are the tricky bit. I have some concentric switches, but it turns out they are nine positions on the outer and six on the inner. Sigh... I have a p...

That Power Designs 2020 is lovely! Ooooh, I'd give one of those a home. I fear I'm going to have to test my supplies... I have a later version of the Tenma (dual 30V 3A); I use it for charging lead-acid batteries. It is horrible inside and clearly wouldn't pass any EMC tests despite being a linear s...

To be fair, he's used lightweight bricks. But nobody has told him about corbelling, and I'm not even certain that cement was involved. But the air-conditioning has been fitted. Hong Kong?

I found that if you attempt to cycle uphill in deep snow, the rear wheel spins. (This was before mountain bikes with chunky tyres became fashionable.) My CZ125 motorcycle coped very well with snow once I had got rid of the (supplied) Barum rectangular profile tyres. Yes, sometimes the back wheel wou...

OK, I can see why you have taken handles and bumpers off. My 6' bench isn't quite as crammed, but its shelf is stacked just as high.

Here's the awful PSU. Scale is 5V/div, 200ms/div. Turned on at 1 division, hits a peak 27V(!), hits a minimum 0V, finally reaches correct value (~2V) at the far right after 1400ms (1.4s!) I fear I'm going to have to check all my bench supplies. I'd already discovered a nasty Keithley 2400 sourcemet...

Then some of it will have been through the military, or worse, the education sector - technical colleges and universities. Actually, I bought most of my equipment new. (Haggled on price, mind.) It's only since retiring that I've bought second-hand stuff. I'm learning that other people's idea of &qu...

I'll (reluctantly) agree with the above. Mind you, I looked after my kit at work exactly as I do at home; I had fought to get the money to buy the equipment on my bench, so I was certainly going to look after it. If you are known to look after your kit and extract real value from it it's a lot easie...

I use the covers on all my 'scopes every time. I take care of my equipment and like it to stay as close as possible to as-new condition. After all, it was expensive, so why damage it? I never put fingers on screens because I don't like to see fingerprints/finger grease there. And once there, they ca...

500ms is quite enough time for the magic smoke to escape... According to Royal Mail, my Keithley 2010 is now less than five miles away. It is now < 5m and gently warming before I apply power this evening. It hasn't got a handle. Why do people remove handles? There should be a special place reserved ...

Those TTi supplies are very good ergonomically; I particularly like the way the current meter shows where you've set the current limit, then shows actual current when the output is switched on. What I don't know is their failure mode. Farnell supplies and earlier TTI supplies failed to maximum volta...

Likewise, someone has been on the lab bench at night recently, batting stuff here and there over the floor. I could shut the door, but Binx would then come and settle on my legs at night (which I don't like). I asked who was guilty, but Heidi is too thick to be embarrassed (lovely nature, though) an...

While I'm happy to use an iron for desoldering small components, a hot air gun may be better for large components with many leads. Agreed; I recently used hot air to recover the ZIF socket from an aged programmer. I note your comment about temperature differential and thermal shock in small ceramic...

They do that. Just something you have to live with. I've got used to the idea that walking barefoot in the lab risks being stabbed by snipped-off component leads, but discarded claw sheaths have been more common lately and they can't be detected/captured by a neodymium magnet.

I have just looked and found a few gaps in my punches. At the larger end where they're >£50 each. Those punches can't be bought speculatively, only when there's a specific need. And 62.5mm wasn't there, the nearest was 65mm, which I have.

Pah! I knew instantly what you were talking about when you mentioned Jars. I have both volumes of the "Handbook of Wireless Telegraphy" (1938), I'll have you know. Before Christmas, Sainsburys had some inverted truncated pyramid tins (shortbread rounds with Belgian chocolate) that had a ra...

Time in mhos? I don't believe it! I then wracked my brains and remembered that mho was an old-fashioned unit for conductance, but the proper (SI) unit is siemens (S), not seconds (s). We need Boltzmann's constant (k) to calculate resistor noise, requiring absolute temperature in kelvin (K), and reme...

Doing most things for the first time is more interesting than repeating experiences. But by the 10th time... When I was teaching, I found the third time I gave a given lecture was the best. By that time, I'd got the bugs out and useful details in. After that, it went downhill because it became rout...

Use a pre-heater! It reduces the dwell time for the hot air drastically And that applies to soldering with an iron on a PCB, too. If you are fast and organised, you can rotate through many joints, soldering nearby and benefitting from the pre-heating to give faster better joints. I solder SMD with ...

Wow! I've modified PCBs and I see that their handling precautions are similar to mine, yet I think they would consider me to be a complete novice. Impressive stuff.

Robert wrote: ↑Fri Feb 06, 2026 8:31 pm Tooling and accessories cost more than the machines.

My Hobbymat lathe now has 20 Dickson quick change tool holders; they alone are worth more than the lathe itself. And as for all the other twiddly bits. But it's very satisfying to be able to make something finely machined yourself.

One of the reasons I bought my first lathe was that I felt I was getting too dependent on my job (where I had access to a Lend/Lease South Bend lathe and Emco table top mill). I didn't like the idea that I couldn't leave for fear of losing access to machine tools. I then bought a copy of the Emco ta...

Ah yes, tooling. I frequently make tools in the workshop to enable further workshop tools to be made to make test equipment for the lab to develop something that will play music. Maybe. As an example, I made a D-bit to drill a tapered hole for the box that stores collets for my (home-made) tapping f...

That's cheating. The whole point of making a steam engine is to learn how to do the various manufacturing processes and improve your skills. I'll agree that hobbing gears is best farmed out, but the rest is all perfectly doable. I've just scrapped the (presumed duff) SATA CD drive and it yeilded a p...

Ah, forgot Sullivan. Just as good, if not better. Years ago, I (stupidly) failed to rescue a beautiful Sullivan 1nF variable capacitor. Alright, it was a bit big (about a 10" mahogany cube), but still. It had a Vernier scale and slow motion drive. I think I've fixed the XP machine's erratic boo...