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

[mnementh]

...A peek into construction work of our kitchen (it's almost finished now, but we lived with the kitchen as a construction site for several months).



Still much to do in the new "old" house, so expect me to be lurking most of the time the next months still.
Those who are also reading eevblogs TEA-thread will spot that I reused my "I'm back"-posting from there. But there it was only text to get not too OT.

EOM

Looks positively elegant to me.

Welcome home, URI !

mnem

[dl6lr]

All kitchen companies we consulted would do the planning for us but weren't able to plan and offer us what we wanted -at least not at a reasonable price. So we ended up buying an Ikea kitchen and used it as a kit bashing base. 8)

We did our kitchen ourselves from IKEA as well. I inspected their cupboards and found them to be compatible in quality and a friend assured, they come from the same company that does make them for major brands. We invested abt. 10k€ and all others had abt. 3 times the price.
The downsides: They will carry thousand of items and boxes into your house and you have to sign that you got everything delivered. You are not able to check all the pieces in the short time frame. In the end we got *more* delivered than ordered, and we contacted another person (we could identify by his name and contacted him through email) so he come to pick up some items he was missing. He was slighly annoyed as he was missing a lot of parts.

The countertop was done by IKEA as well, they made laser measurements in our kitchen. Unfortunately they managed to do one piece a little bit too long (measurement was correct but we found out they added abt. one cm instead of subtracting it), but I could peel of the banding and cut off one or two cm and glue the banding back on. Otherwise it would have taken weeks for a new piece...

If you look around, you will find the original manufacturer of the IKEA electrical appliances as well.

[Cubdriver]

The countertop was done by IKEA as well, they made laser measurements in our kitchen. Unfortunately they managed to do one piece a little bit too long (measurement was correct but we found out they added abt. one cm instead of subtracting it), but I could peel of the banding and cut off one or two cm and glue the banding back on. Otherwise it would have taken weeks for a new piece...

If you look around, you will find the original manufacturer of the IKEA electrical appliances as well.

Much better that they made it a bit too long. If not, well, you can cut it twice, but it'll still be too short!

-Pat

[Cubdriver]

It's only my second 5370B, that's not concernig, isn't it?

It's always nice to have a backup. In field testing, our mantra tends towards "Two is one, and one is none", because if the only one you have breaks or gets lost, you're hosed.

-Pat

[tggzzz]

The joy of renovation - you never know WHAT you’re going to find when you take down a wall or ceiling covering! Sounds like it was quite an adventure and effort, but I’m sure it’ll be well worth it. Looks like a very nice home, and a beautiful area - congrats on the move, and welcome back!

Daughter is going through something similar in a ~1938 house.

The relevant concepts are "archaeological excavation" and "palimpsest".

EDIT: 5 mins after posting that, I came across this: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/202 ... -york-flat
"A man renovating his kitchen has found a 400-year-old wall painting of “national significance” in his York flat. Parts of the friezes, dating back to about 1660, were found by kitchen fitters in Luke Budworth’s flat on Micklegate in York city centre last year and have since been fully uncovered. The paintings are thought to be older than the buildings at either side of the wall and are based on scenes from the 1635 book Emblems written by the poet Francis Quarles."

Poor sod.

[URI]

It's only my second 5370B, that's not concernig, isn't it?

It's always nice to have a backup. In field testing, our mantra tends towards "Two is one, and one is none", because if the only one you have breaks or gets lost, you're hosed.

-Pat

Pat, you just gave me the relief I urgently needed. My wife would beg to differ but she's not into TE(A) anyway.

Thanks all for your warm welcome, it feels like coming home again.

[tggzzz]

We moved in without the kitchen being built up. Electric installations were of course also remade here:
20220308_kitchen_raw.jpg

All kitchen companies we consulted would do the planning for us but weren't able to plan and offer us what we wanted -at least not at a reasonable price. So we ended up buying an Ikea kitchen and used it as a kit bashing base. 8)

My daughter's "domestic kitchen" has improved so it now looks like that. The "commercial kitchen" is more or less complete and usable, but doesn't have a cooker.

As described elsewhere, Christmas lunch was cooked in the 3rd bedroom, aided by an HP5371A viewtopic.php?p=1765#p1765

Should be choosing the Ikea cabinets next week. Possibly. Maybe.

[Cubdriver]

It's only my second 5370B, that's not concernig, isn't it?

It's always nice to have a backup. In field testing, our mantra tends towards "Two is one, and one is none", because if the only one you have breaks or gets lost, you're hosed.

-Pat

Pat, you just gave me the relief I urgently needed. My wife would beg to differ but she's not into TE(A) anyway.

Thanks all for your warm welcome, it feels like coming home again.

Another benefit of having a spare is that comparison can make troubleshooting much simpler should one fail - swapping boards back and forth for fault isolation, comparative measurements, etc.

-Pat

[mansaxel]

All kitchen companies we consulted would do the planning for us but weren't able to plan and offer us what we wanted -at least not at a reasonable price. So we ended up buying an Ikea kitchen and used it as a kit bashing base. 8)

We did our kitchen ourselves from IKEA as well. I inspected their cupboards and found them to be compatible in quality and a friend assured, they come from the same company that does make them for major brands. We invested abt. 10k€ and all others had abt. 3 times the price.
The downsides: They will carry thousand of items and boxes into your house and you have to sign that you got everything delivered. You are not able to check all the pieces in the short time frame. In the end we got *more* delivered than ordered, and we contacted another person (we could identify by his name and contacted him through email) so he come to pick up some items he was missing. He was slighly annoyed as he was missing a lot of parts.

The countertop was done by IKEA as well, they made laser measurements in our kitchen. Unfortunately they managed to do one piece a little bit too long (measurement was correct but we found out they added abt. one cm instead of subtracting it), but I could peel of the banding and cut off one or two cm and glue the banding back on. Otherwise it would have taken weeks for a new piece...

Since I live in Sweden, I of course have an IKEA kitchen. They work. Ours is probably around 27 years old now. Most of the wear is to fronts, TBH. And the countertop, which is a custom job in mosaic. Not great, but has mostly survived too. I just priced a complete, one piece, stainless countertop with hole for induction range and integrated sink. Just above 5000€. That will have to wait a bit.

If you look around, you will find the original manufacturer of the IKEA electrical appliances as well.

Whirlpool, IIRC. We just bought a new in-cabinet microwave from IKEA. It works. Other than that, we've been mostly happy with B/S/H appliances, for which there actually are spare parts available. I'm gathering courage to swap the function selector of our oven, which broke pretty early, and I've been sitting on the extremely expensive spare part (75€) for some months now. Oven lamp glass was easier. They even ship a custom wrench to swap it out with.

[URI]

As for our ikea-kitchen I can say, that we're very happy with the build quality.
It's on the same quality level like other brands that can cost a lot more.
But on the other hand you can plan/combine the ikea cabinets and pieces freely yourself and with the availability of single parts you can build your own special solution.

Our kitchen isn't that big and we wanted to use the space it has best as possible. All suggestions from other companies relied on their individual standard solutions and changes to that were the costly part.

So we left that ground and turned to kitbashing with ikea.
In fact it isn't that much different from a genuine, complete ikea kitchen.
We wanted a worktop (or countertop? -"Arbeitsfläche") at 105cm above the floor and we wanted a 90cm wide kitchen hood although our cooking zone is standard 60cm -the extra 30cm is for other damp-producing devices such as an electrical kettle, an egg-cooker or a coffee machine. So the cabinets housing the non-ikea kitchen hood were built using a normal hanging cabinet that I adapted for that purpose by cutting out the openings needed and fitted some extra parts in that I made.
We also wanted an oven with specific features and didn't want to give a leg or an arm for it.

So we ended up with an ikea kitchen planned with the ikea self service planing tool and individualised the parts list in an individual face-to-face-meeting at our local ikea store.

After some weeks a lorry showed up and two nice men filled our garage with countless packages and parts. My wife and me together were able to double check the parts list in the time the parts came in -but only we two as a team could compete with the speed of the delivery men -and we finally succeeded. To our satisfaction exactly all ordered parts were there.

Sidenote: We ordered the kitchen some weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine resulting in shortages in many scopes, including furniture. Our ikea agent had a good and a bad message for us:
The good one: All items we ordered could be delivered (that was not the case for some parts we didn't need and especially for items made of birch wood -mainly coming from Ukraine).
The bad one: Less then ten parts couldn't be delivered -we had to pick them up ourselves.

[dl6lr]

If you look around, you will find the original manufacturer of the IKEA electrical appliances as well.

Whirlpool, IIRC. We just bought a new in-cabinet microwave from IKEA. It works. Other than that, we've been mostly happy with B/S/H appliances, for

I think it depends. The dish washer is identical to a BSH dish washer. The oven is from AEG Electrolux. I haven't found the exact hotplate and I don't remember the hood. It lacks a stable knob, I have already fixed it twice. AFAIK you can only get the whole switch as a replacement (which wouldn't fix the cause).

Bernd

[mnementh]

...EDIT: 5 mins after posting that, I came across this: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/202 ... -york-flat
"A man renovating his kitchen has found a 400-year-old wall painting of “national significance” in his York flat. Parts of the friezes, dating back to about 1660, were found by kitchen fitters in Luke Budworth’s flat on Micklegate in York city centre last year and have since been fully uncovered. The paintings are thought to be older than the buildings at either side of the wall and are based on scenes from the 1635 book Emblems written by the poet Francis Quarles."

Poor sod.

Huh.

mnem
*remembering a scene from Winter's Tale*

[tggzzz]

...EDIT: 5 mins after posting that, I came across this: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/202 ... -york-flat
"A man renovating his kitchen has found a 400-year-old wall painting of “national significance” in his York flat. Parts of the friezes, dating back to about 1660, were found by kitchen fitters in Luke Budworth’s flat on Micklegate in York city centre last year and have since been fully uncovered. The paintings are thought to be older than the buildings at either side of the wall and are based on scenes from the 1635 book Emblems written by the poet Francis Quarles."

Poor sod.

Huh.

Those paintings may impose legal requirements on what can't be done to the house, and also to preserve them unaltered. That tends to affect the cost of insurance and getting any work done on the house.

The insurance on my parents' house roughly doubled when I accidentally discovered it was Grade II listed. If it had burned down then I, as the new owner, would have been legally liable for reinstating it to its previous condition. Not a good position to be in; those costs would have bankrupted me. Fortunately it has been sold, just before the house prices tanked and fuel costs skyrocketed

[Specmaster]

Those paintings may impose legal requirements on what can't be done to the house, and also to preserve them unaltered. That tends to affect the cost of insurance and getting any work done on the house.

The insurance on my parents' house roughly doubled when I accidentally discovered it was Grade II listed. If it had burned down then I, as the new owner, would have been legally liable for reinstating it to its previous condition. Not a good position to be in; those costs would have bankrupted me. Fortunately it has been sold, just before the house prices tanked and fuel costs skyrocketed

Hmm, yes, that is a valid point, maybe they should have kept quiet and just carried on with whatever they were going to do. If the National Trust or whoever was making those rules were to buy the property at a fair price, then they can be held responsible for insurance.

[tggzzz]

Those paintings may impose legal requirements on what can't be done to the house, and also to preserve them unaltered. That tends to affect the cost of insurance and getting any work done on the house.

The insurance on my parents' house roughly doubled when I accidentally discovered it was Grade II listed. If it had burned down then I, as the new owner, would have been legally liable for reinstating it to its previous condition. Not a good position to be in; those costs would have bankrupted me. Fortunately it has been sold, just before the house prices tanked and fuel costs skyrocketed

Hmm, yes, that is a valid point, maybe they should have kept quiet and just carried on with whatever they were going to do. If the National Trust or whoever was making those rules were to buy the property at a fair price, then they can be held responsible for insurance.

I don't know about the designation of that painting, but having your house listed or having a tree preservation order is something That Is Done To You. In the case of my parents' house, it was listed in the register in 1994, but I only found out about it while idly browsing the listed register in 2020.

The register has the address as 35 NorthSouth Rd but the postal address is 59 EastWest Rd. Now 1-33 NorthSouth Rd were all listed at the same time and are an early Victorian terrace. 59 EastWest Rd at the position of 35 NorthSouth Rd but rotated through 90 degrees so that the front door is on EastWest Rd (there are no doors on NorthSouth Rd, but there might once have been a servants' entrance below street level, next to and between the outside toilet and coal bunker).

Screenshot1.jpg

Curiously during the sale of the property I did come across an old surveyor's document calling it 35 Anglesea Place.

The other odd point is that there were a couple of plots without houses a couple of hundred yards away; they might have been bomb damage, but I'm not sure. Someone found that, claimed the plot for themselves (cost: £0) and built a block of flats there. The other plot was claimed by multiple neighbours, and split up in such a way that it is a small community garden.

Screenshot1.jpg

[mnementh]

...If the National Trust or whoever was making those rules were to buy the property at a fair price, then they can be held responsible for insurance.

Yeah, I've made similar suggestion to our Cown & Tounty tax officers regarding their valuation of our property; they didn't even bat an eye.

mnem
Death of a thousand paper cuts...

[Specmaster]

I think that there are some odd forces in play at times when they assign actual address to properties, for instance my son lives here where the arrow is (Armistice Ave) and yet his postal address is Centenary Way, WTF

Odd address.jpg

[tggzzz]

I've just had something delivered (I hope) to "9/5 Foobaz Avenue" in Glasgow. That's building 9 flat 5. Apparently that's a recurring problem because his address contains that explanation!

And then I've had to suggest to people in 9 Foobaz Close that they put "opposite the supermarket" in their address, since get their parcels in 9 Foobaz Rd. Gurgle maps doesn't have Foobaz Close on the maps in the right place; it has only been there for 90 years, so I suppose it isn't surprising those kiddies haven't caught up yet.

[bd139]

Post codes and addresses are a mess usually. It requires local knowledge and experience, something that Evri never had, the Post Office is losing and UPS substitutes it for a good drop kick over a fence roughly in the vicinity of where it's supposed to be going.

[tggzzz]

Post codes and addresses are a mess usually. It requires local knowledge and experience, something that Evri never had, the Post Office is losing and UPS substitutes it for a good drop kick over a fence roughly in the vicinity of where it's supposed to be going.

All those carriers are ok here; I suspect it depends on the individuals and how pissed off they are.

Gurgle has had (has?) some houses in my road with two postcodes. Other maps are better.

[mnementh]

WOWStick.JPG https://www.amazon.com/WOWSTICK-Screwdr ... 09GJLDBK4/

Heh... I just ordered up this little Chinesium beauty cuz... 11 dollah. Lorts of discounts!

These are all cheap knockoffs of the MiniWare smart driver, which uses an accelerometer to control the driver action with just a twist of the wrist; this is a much more natural control interface. But those cost $100-ish, so unless you make your living tearing laptops apart, not really a cost-effective choice.

I will admit, I'd probably have been all up in one of them back when I nuked VCRSs & CD player for a living, tho... and I'm sure the body being carved out of 304 stainless like my favorite EDC flashlights must make the thing a joy in the hand...

https://www.amazon.com/MINIWARE-Screwdr ... B09MVM9PTW


mnem
we'll see what shows up...download/file.php?mode=view&id=837&sid= ... 48194d8132

.

It's arrived; a day late as Amazon decided to save a shekel by combining the delivery with a much more expensive bit. meh.

Packaging is very iStuff; little boxes inside of big box and each bit in a silky white plastic baggie.

That said; after a few minutes fiddling with it, I'll say the general quality level is actually much higher than expected. Enough so that I want to take a few more pics and get into it once it's had a chance to fully charge up.

Honestly, if I'd known how well-made it is at first look (like if I'd seen it on sale at a Expo vendor's table and had a chance to hold it in my hands) I'd not have hesitated to pay the $20 regular price it still has on Amazon. Definitely 2 thumbs up from this tool dwagon.

mnem

[URI]

uhh, excitement slowly rising. Houston, we got a delivery date for my upcoming 5370B:

20230323_screenshot_est_del-date_5370B.png

(March, 30th - during the day)

It was handled at Pitney Bowes in Erlanger and sent out on Tuesday.

I hope repackaging at Pitney Bowes was done carefully and properly!

Side note: There's a reason why I have parts of two damaged HP 8110A Pulse Generators somewhere and only one intact one that I frankensteined together from three units that were all damaged in the transportation process due to bad/wrong (re)packaging at Pitney Bowes.

[25 CPS]

now that is the way to prepare carrots. they will be wonderful.

could never stand carrots glazed in sugar. even as a kid they grossed me out. (not sure why because most other sweets are irresistible)

I ran into this nasty concoction a week ago. I was driving to the Philadelphia area to visit a friend of mine who bought a new house and stopped at a Perkins in Williamsport, PA to break for dinner. I had the pot roast with mashed potatoes and carrots, and I foolishly didn't think to ask how the carrots were prepared. Sure enough, they came coated in this awful creamy sugar glaze that I did my best to scrape off. The rest of the meal was good but wow, those carrots were truly horrible.

The house was an estate sale. My friend bought it from another friend's parents' estate and the house came with some test equipment. Two HP 410D meters, another piece of test equipment from General Electric and an RCA amplifier as well as three boxes of tubes and a Telequipment scope. They were on the other side of a demolition project in the basement so I couldn't get to them easily so I left them be for now. I want to do some organization work on my own place first before bringing anything more home and I want to go over these the next time I'm down and have some more time to dig into them after the basement demolition project is finished up so I can see if they're worth bringing home. That, unfortunately, is an open question, because they sat for decades in a very, very damp basement and mitigating the damage from that is the reason for the demolition project.

None of the test equipment in my truck saw much use except for the IR camera which was used to watch some parts get warm but I'll do a separate post about that once I have the pictures downloaded from the SD card inside.

[tggzzz]

now that is the way to prepare carrots. they will be wonderful.

could never stand carrots glazed in sugar. even as a kid they grossed me out. (not sure why because most other sweets are irresistible)

I ran into this nasty concoction a week ago. I was driving to the Philadelphia area to visit a friend of mine who bought a new house and stopped at a Perkins in Williamsport, PA to break for dinner. I had the pot roast with mashed potatoes and carrots, and I foolishly didn't think to ask how the carrots were prepared. Sure enough, they came coated in this awful creamy sugar glaze that I did my best to scrape off. The rest of the meal was good but wow, those carrots were truly horrible.

Never understood sugar glazes, but then I've always preferred savoury. Even as a kid I preferred salami to sweets.

When I'm doing an ordinary roast, I'll peel carrots and lob them in with the other veg. They emerge wonderfully sweet, not sickly sweet. Cooking time is a little longer than the spuds, or by first getting up to temperature in the microwave.

[bd139]

I experienced sugar glazed carrots once. Vile concoction. The fact they exist explains a lot.

I rather like them just sliced and steamed for 15 minutes or so aka "council carrots". Plenty of flavour!