Sorry for the delay bringing the benchtime and after pics; it's been a pretty hectic week or so.
So first off, I needed to clean up these crusty BNCs. Wiping with towel and Q-tips moistened with IPA and Windex didn't touch it; so I had to resort to slightly harsher methods: brass wire brush. These connectors are nickel-plated, so as long as I used a real brass brush, no harm will come to them. Sadly, the usual cheap outlets have started carrying brass-tone steel brushes in their assortments, and as you might imagine, I have had some disastrous results with those.
Insides were not nearly as crusty, so those got scrubbed with a flattened cotton swap dipped in IPA to protect the PTFE insulator.
After that came time to remove the stubborn label ookum from around the the mil-spec fused BNC for CH C; this took a lot of gentle scrubbing and scraping work after soaking that end of the depopulated panel in detergent overnight at the suggestion of our own resident enginee-aardvark, Cerebus.
Without his kind advice on the pernicious chemistry involved in aging and some kinds of label adhesive, those visible scrapes would probably have been much worse;
I was pretty frustrated at this point and might have gotten
medieval on its arse.
I'll just draw your attention to number 10 here...
As I had the front panel dismantled for this work and access to the borked power switch, I spent a while scrubbing the button tops and sides with IPA to get rid of whatever had been splattered across the middle of the panel. It was time consuming, but well worth it. And I got to spend some quality time with those delicious buckling-spring switches.
That said; the panel certainly did clean up nicely; and pre-assembly testing showed the buttons were all quite functional. (Thank Ifni!)
After that, I turned my attention to the borked power switch. As I mentioned earlier, the shaft of the switch was snapped off almost flush; I considered sourcing a new switch, but decided first to try my hand at printing something.
I had an existing model I'd worked up for some buttons on my 8111A a couple years ago; I started with this and modified a copy of that model to what you see on the right.
First iteration fit perfectly, and actually snapped on almost tight. It was close enough that I decided to try a little epoxy abuse rather than fettle with it any more. I do believe that was the better choice. And no, just like the knobs on my 54600, the buttons are not at all purple IRL. It's just my old Canon G10 seems to do that in with this semi-translucent filament against that grey-eige background.
A nice high-res glam shot on the bench before I engage in the
Bench TETRIS necessary to put it into service; shown here last triggered on some random noise in the shop.
Here it is in its new home, happily counting a
very approximately 10MHz signal from my 8111A...
I now have what I think I can safely call an
[ hp ] corner.
Cheers, and I hope you enjoyed this little photo junket!
mnem
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