Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) : Discussion and Group Therapy Thread

[Zenith]

Just popped into my inbox... confirms values are often over estimated and that a professional valuation is useful.
https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/i- ... tta5E9el7r

As it wasn't part of a noted collection, my reaction would have been that it was paste jewellery and tourist junk, obviously not worth enough to be worth mentioning.

If they were convinced it was worth tens of thousands, it would have made sense to retain an accredited valuer, instructing him to give a probate evaluation.

[tggzzz]

Quite possibly, who knows.

In some cases it should be possible to reclaim overpaid IHT. I'm an unexpected beneficiary, and will benefit because a house sold for £350k rather than the presumed £425k. But there will be limitations; a sale on the open market is the starting point. Obviously I would have benefitted even more if the estate needed to pay more IHT

However, I was paying more attention to the slightly less anecdotal

The most overvalued item was an antique clock bought for £2,500. The most common survey answers put it at between £1,000 and £2,000, while the correct probate value was only £320.

A Bosch washing machine was routinely estimated at £200-£400, despite a probate value of £40. A diamond ring, bought for £6,250 and in excellent condition, now had a probate value of £1,250, but most survey answers put it at £4,000 or more.

Overall, more than 80% of people overestimated probate values.

[Zenith]

I'd have thought a second hand washing machine, unless it was a premium brand such as Miele, or an industrial washing machine, such as would be found in the laundry room of a block of flats designated sheltered accommodation, would be worth little more than scrap value, so £40 if it was working, would be about right. These days most consumer washing machines, including Bosch, are designed not to be repairable.

The value of the clock would have to be based on auction prices. This in itself is not straightforward, because if it was in a provincial auction house it might not fetch as much as in a clock auction run by a major auction house.

I'd have thought that apart from historic pieces, or valuable and celebrated items, such as something owned by Liz Taylor, jewellery was mainly scrap value, because people like to buy new.

My experience of probate valuations comes from helping a friend who had to make a trip from South Africa, and so had limited time, to sort out his aunt's house and contents, which had been left to him and his sister. The aunt had been keen on antiques in a small way. We knew nothing about antiques but guessed it was not just second hand furniture and chattels. I suggested he got in a valuer from Bonham's who went through the place and was very knowledgeable. Stuff we thought might be valuable he dismissed as junk and explained why. His eyes lit up when he saw a nondescript table in a corner. A regency tea table. He demonstrated how it had cunningly contrived drawers for the tea dishes. £1,000. Several sets of small jugs which were excellent examples of some sort of ware - £200 a set. There were sets of Staffordshire Willow Pattern China. He said it was a speciality interest and he wasn't an expert and could only guess the value.

[tggzzz]

The value of the clock would have to be based on auction prices. This in itself is not straightforward, because if it was in a provincial auction house it might not fetch as much as in a clock auction run by a major auction house.

Auction prices are a can of worms. There's always a 2:1 spread in valuation, then there's mis-description, then there's how many people want it in the day. All that can lead to a 10:1 variation, occasionally more.

I'll ignore the "mark it low and tip off a friend" type tactics.

He said it was a speciality interest and he wasn't an expert and could only guess the value.

All our stuff fits that, so if the beneficiary is prepared to flog it themselves, they could be very pleasantly surprised.

You can subscribe to services that show you the historic prices realised; if you can be bothered to search for an item, you can get a value.

[Zenith]

A thing is worth whatever you have to pay to get one if you are buyer, or whatever you can get for it if you are a seller. Of course it's not quite that simple, but that's basically it. There are perfect and imperfect markets etc, and how long you are prepared to wait, either as a buyer or seller. How you present the item and other factors are important. There's no objective value for an item, although near perfect markets make it look so.

[Robert]

TEA today
A package arrived today with a bit of handheld TE. A Wheelbarrow Mk8 Release Tester. Anyone know what it's for? I tried it out on my Shrike...

wheelbarrow test.jpg

Robert.

[EC8010]

I believe bomb squad people had a small remotely controlled tracked vehicle called a Wheelbarrow. It's quite old for the die-cast box to use slotted head (probably 4BA) screws.

[tggzzz]

At the recent Dunstable Downs rally I picked up a small LCR bridge at I price I could afford to lose. It seems to sort of work; the basic bridge components are 1%, so having 3 decades of resistors seems optimistic.

I've had a closer look now. Looks like the sensitivity pot is excessively noisy. The resistance range isn't bad, but the capacitance range is awful: 500nF reads as 437nF, 40nF reads as 35.4nF. Since they are mica reference capacitors, I know which I trust. Note that both of those readings are c12% low. Hmm.

Opening the box reveals a cramped interior where the PCB is "glued" to the front panel by all the switches; prefer not to fiddle with that. But on one edge I see a solitary large capacitor, 0.1µF 600V without a tolerance. Hmm. Measure that (in circuit) and it is 113nF Bodge an ~87nF capacitor in parallel and 500nF reads as 203nF. Bingo.

Started looking at precision 100nF caps on fleabay. There are some, but they cost £15-20, more than I paid for the bridge. Not going to happen.Eventually realise I have a component drawer full of polystyrene caps, and that it wouldn't take too many to increase that 87nF cap to 100nF.

So tomorrow's job will be to fettle with capacitors to make a 500nF reference capacitor read as 500nF.

[Zenith]

As above. It seems to be a device for testing a British Army bomb disposal robot called a Wheelbarrow.

Unless they have hidden treasures, or you want to test a Wheelbarrow robot, I can't see them being worth more than 50p.

[Robert]

But what does it test on a Wheelbarrow? And yes it is the EOD robot. Don't say "the release" Good spot on the lid screws but It's not that old. There is thick waterproofing gasket added under the lid so the needed longer screws.(M3.5 not trilobular).
As I said I've already used it to test something... No I don't have a wheelbarrow.

[AVGresponding]

Yeah that's from the early 1990's, earliest. It's for testing the integrity of the various circuits on the arm (position control, a couple of firing circuits for controlled detonation etc); you don't want to be in the middle of prodding at something only to have one of them not work.
The LEDs are a go/no go for seven individual circuits, not a bar-graph.

[Robert]

Pretty close. It's for testing the firing circuits.
Interestingly it didn't like the output of the Shrike (a standard 4 channel exploder). It shorted some 1N5822 (40V) Schottky diodes on the inputs.
I guess as the wheelbarrow doesn't need to drive long cables it uses lower voltage than a unit that has to drive hundreds of feet of wire.

[AVGresponding]

The early ones were powered by a couple of car batteries in series iirc, SLAs on later versions, so nominally 24VDC

[Robert]

Having repaired the Wheelbarrow tester I ran some tests on it. I'm very surprised at how low an energy will cause it to indicate a "pass". I won't go into details on a public but it's orders of magnitude lower than what I would expect. As a number of these have appeared on the surplus market clearly unused I wonder if the were discovered to not be fit for purpose. The company that made them went broke recently.
One reason I know about this stuff is I've designed pyrotechnic firing circuits for aircraft and the car in my avitar. I also designed all-fire, no-fire testers for the car. The car had pyro activated fire suppression, brake parachute releases an an ejector seat rocket motor in the nose.
Rather embarrassingly the parachute release failed to fire the first time we tried it live. This was puzzling as basic tests showed adequate voltage at the connector. The whole thing was on a shoestring budget. I'd wanted a single piece of 16 AWG, twisted pair, screened cable with a temperature rating of at least 105 deg C. One of the other volunteers brought in a roll of Raychem spec 55 cable from the quarantine store at his aerospace work place. This was run in the length of the car. So after misfire safety routines it was back in the workshop for tests. Full voltage, 24 at the connector. Hmm. So I shorted one end and measured the loop resistance. It was 24 ohms Well with a 24V supply, 24Ohm wire and 1 ohm squib you get less than 1A. And the squib was a safer 1 Ohm, 1A, 1W no-fire type and sure enough it didn't fire.
I then checked each core of the twin cable. One core was about 8 Ohms and the other was about 16 Ohms What the hell how can two cores of the same twisted pair be so different?
Then I looked at the cable more closely and discovered it was type K (Cromel/Alumel) thermocouple cable!
What really sucked was that I'd spent a fair bit of my own money on type K cable for the two engine TGT indicators.
A new run of 16 AWG copper cable fixed the problem. I didn’t terminate the type K cable. I like to think that if I had I'd have noticed the difference from tinned copper having worked with type K before.

[mnementh]

Oh dear... just a week away. Is anybelly coming to meet for lunch this time?

Cheers,

mnem
yes, you may touch it.

I would love to go but Blondie is having the remaining kidney stones removed on Friday.

Def a higher priority. The June one is usually the biggest of the season unless we get rained out, which forecast is sunny thru Sunday this weekend.

Cheers!

mnem
*toddles off to the ATM*