That was my electronic experimenting era too, but I don't remember any problems. There were various mail order firms around (Henrys, G.W.Smith) and Watts Radio in Kingston Apple Market (still there) sold components as did a little shop in Hounslow just down the road from the Coop: if I was quick I could go there and be back within my tea-break time.
Any room in the old gits' shed? L was power pentode, F was its weaker non-power sibling. Must be correct since I can't ever forget the PL36: bug bastid power pentode thing to drive the line coils and EHT transformer. Now the smallest of the small must have been the FM demodulator of our telly:: EH80 rings a bell. It fell out once and left all the other candles without any heater juice, since they were all chained.
The fresh of face must have web kites covering this by now, all full of flash and other essentials.
No, EL 34/84 were power pentodes. I think the L means 'power'
KT66 ws a beam terode, but thats yank speek.
That's just plain wrong. My father and later myself managed to obtain everything he needed from the early 60s onwards. I can't remember who all the suppliers were but any issue of Practical Wireless from the time would be revealing. Electrovalue and Ambit were the ones we mostly used.
If you mean getting things cheap was difficult then that's a different matter. RS were trade only in those days but most large towns had a shop that would order stuff for you.
They certainly did exist by the early 70s.
MBQ
About '74 ISTR. 1979 was the first time they produced what would be recongnisable as "the maplin catalogue" today.
"John Rumm" wrote | >>Maplin didn't exist... | > They certainly did exist by the early 70s. | About '74 ISTR. 1979 was the first time they produced what | would be recongnisable as "the maplin catalogue" today.
I still remember my old Maplin Customer Number - 100605. (Bit like an Army Number for those old enough to do National Service, I suppose.) The last time I tried to order using it, they wouldn't accept it as it was 'too short'.
Someone'll probably pop up and say they were Maplin Customer 000031 now...
Owain
Well, I was no. 000054 (I jest)
and have still got all the Ambit International catalogues (true) (and some OC71s, OC81s and AF117s ) (also true - sadly)
Must look them out to sell on E-Bay at some exhorbitant price
;-))
Nick
There also used to be an electronics shop down the road in Hampton Court.
cheers, Pete.
Anybody remember Technical Trading in Brighton? Big ad on page 3 of some magazine (Practical Wireless?). Long list of valves...
They come up quite often, but don't fetch that much.
In article , Pete C writes
There were two in Crowtree Road - the Red Radio Shop shop, run by the late Bob Sharp G2HMI; and Pattison's, who refused to sell transistors and went out of business in the mid 60s, although he was good for Denco coils and aerial wire.
Electrovalue started up in te late 60's, frtom a shed in surrey.
Prior to that it was Henry's radio mainly IIRC.
Yes.
Don't think so...mid 70's more like.
(Joining the old farts natter late) So what us then-young-un's used to do was get stripper boards by the pound - ee-lec-tron-ick Modules, PCBs, and the occaisional bagfull of assorted nuttiness, either by mail order (John Bull Electrical is still going, selling surplus items by type these days - haven't noticed "parcels of surplus shold by weight" over there any more, but maybe they're still there), or at your Local Electronics Shop for Local People. At the revelant time (early 70s for me), local was Manchester - there was a little place in Shude Hill (area behind the Cathedral replaced in the late70s/early80s by the Armpit Centre, shortly afterwards lovingly remodelled by Gerry Adams and the Bombmakers ;-) which sold components and stripper boards.
Going through some of the boxes in the garage, I still come across the odd three-legged tin can desoldered from such a board thirty years ago; oddly enough I haven't used any of those components for ever such a long time, though!
Ob d-i-y: yesterday's minor foray into ee-leck-tron-icks meets ee-leck-triss-it-ee, using components no more than a year old, was to make the kids iMac control the power on external hard drives/CD burner using its own poweron/poweroff. Almost as simple as wiring the coil of a mains-rated-contacts relay across the 12V supply for the hard drive; politeness to the iMac power supply and internals meant a 250mA fuse, followed by a diode, with another normally-reverse-biased diode and 2k resistor in parallel with the relay coil, to give the back EMF somewhere harmless to go when the power drops out. The iMac is a 2nd-gen CRT one - quite easy to open up, unlike the 1st-gen - and with a standard IDE drive and 4-pin power connector; I piggybacked a "power-stealer" male-to-female-with-0V-and-12V-brought-out-on-extra-wired connector (as supplied with many CPU fan kits, and therefore knocking around the relevant spares box in Casa Zaba) into the back of the HD, and there was room alongside the HD to hide away the little bit of circuitry, with the
12V (OK, 11.4V for the pedants ;-) output brought out on a 2way Minifit-Junior wire-mounted Molex just next to the VGA-mirror socket on the back of the iMac - a moment with the Dremel converting one of the small holes at the edge of that connector's cover into a slot running to the edge. Box at the bottom of the iMac trolley has incoming mains, one unrelayed outgoing IEC320 to the iMac mains input, a couple of relay-controlled leads (one IEC320, one calculator-style L&N-only, to suit existing external periphs) and the inevitable 4-way mains block.Ahh, sweet sweet bodging ;-)
"Stefek Zaba" wrote | Ob d-i-y: yesterday's minor foray into ee-leck-tron-icks | meets ee-leck-triss-it-ee, using components no more than | a year old, was to make the kids iMac control the power | on external hard drives/CD burner using its own poweron/ | poweroff. ....
If you'd wired it via a coin meter could have been a nice little earner: "50p in the slot every time you want to use the hard drive, kiddies"
| Ahh, sweet sweet bodging ;-)
And for your next project ...
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