Love the light. Currently in Boston enjoying the delights on a good old-fashioned S-trap syphonic toilet pan that flushes with a beautiful whirlpool effect. Much deeper water level too which reduces "skid-mark" potential.
No doubt "illegal" now but I want one. ;-)
Tim
I did the same thing.
When I bought this house in about 1977 the central heating had a Randall time clock. Crikey, you can still get them.
The switch on the side allowed you to have DHW+CH - Off - DHW only, but not CH without DHW. The arrangement of motorised valves (that I now know to be called S-Plan) in this fully pumped vented system did not preclude that option, and in any case the cylinder stat put it in that mode when it was not calling for heat.
So I put two three-way rotary switches in an ali box with two neons above each switch the switches were ON-OFF-CONT and the neons indicated if HW and DHW were ON and if the room stat and cylinder stat were calling for heat. A few months later I had another idea and turned down the cylinder stat quite a bit, and mounted a toggle switch in the box labeled BOOST that shorted out the cylinder stat prior to bathtime.
I am ashamed to say that the extra switch wire I needed for that amendment was actually a spare CPC, I can't remember what colour sleaving I put on it.
That system was in place for 30 years.
I hate Sangamo timers. The first one I encountered was as a child in my Grandparents house. The motor was very noisy and the arms, I think they were called tappets, were very difficult to set. It did have that crafty wheel for skipping days, but that wasn't exactly user friendly either.
Did you know there is a well hidden fuse, protecting the motor on those clocks? 32mA IIRC
Some of the issues common with pre-war kit...
First the variety of radio technologies then in use. Mainly crystal, reacti on & superhet, and some oddities too. I'd leave the reaction sets alone ini tially, they're very unstable, very prone to transmit, the UI requires an u nderstanding of reaction sets to use it and they're a bit family hostile.
Speakers are a mix. Anything not moving coil is generally audio butchery of one sort or another. Fun maybe, but expect no-one to tolerate it.
Bare live bits were business as normal, expect it. Beware of live chassis, headphones connected direct to B+, 6v dial lamps with 100s of v on them, ae rials that end up live, live knob grubscrews, disintegrating insulation etc .
Some sets ran on dc mains, some on batteries. Battery sets normally used 3: HT, heater and bias or C battery. Dc & battery sets both need a custom psu .
Expect to need to repair capacitors. Reform lytics when possible, restuff c anned papers. Paper caps were often polychlorinated biphenyl oil impregnate d, this stuff was known for killing people.
A lot of 30s sets were homemade. Some never worked properly, and require a sound understanding of (typically) reaction sets to get them working right.
Earlier sets need a long wire aerial erecting. This is easy enough, and rea lly much of what's written in books of the period on this can be ignored. T hey work fine using plastic twine as insulators. Some of the less sensitive or stable sets also require their own earth - all do if you want best perf ormance.
Early ac mains sets used direct heated tubes on ac, causing hum issues. The y aren't common.
Sometimes a set comes without valves, and you need to work out what's suita ble. This requires recognising the various radio technologies in use.
At least they're cheap. Relatively few people have the knowledge & willingn ess to restore such sets.
And they will teach you safe working practices. That or you'll experience w hat HT feels like :). You shouldnt encounter unusually high HT rails of 400
-600v in pre-war set (its a bit of a lethal window).
Reading a few books from the period should explain a lot. You can find a fe w in electronic form online. They used a lot of tricks & techniques I've ne ver seen in transistor kit. I cant think of anything a scope would be usefu l for, unless you need to realign the IF in a multistage superhet.
Prewar sets are full of character, but nothing like as easy as say a 1950s Cossor. And their eagerness to bite people limits their usability. Of cours e you're not likely to run into all these problems on any given set, just b e aware it might take you months of asking questions to get it running.
The upside is a pre-war experience not obtainable with modern equipment. An d despite the assumptions often made about technological progress, there is some truly excellent equipment out there, as well as the very primitive. I 've seen a 1930s receiver thoroughly pwn one of the very best modern receiv ers.
NT
My system pre-dated the common use of zone valves and was a simple gravity HW and pumped CH system. So the HW output from my 3-way switch controlled the boiler and the CH output controlled the pump. It was, of course, wired in a way that also turned the boiler on when there was CH demand even if HW was switched off - which why I wrote "almost" independent control.
I, too, used an ali box - custom made for me by one of the fitters at the place where I was working at the time.
You'd think they'd guess you were an apprentice once and knew all the tricks. ;-)
I did not have a mobile phone was when I was 17.
True - but the principle of skiving is as old as the hills.
I had a phone in my bedroom when I was 15.
This was really rather remarkable.
Owain
Your parents made you sleep in the hall?
[snip]
Thanks, a very useful cautionary list...
Theo
Was it connected to anything? :)
NT
The exchange line, at 15.
The lounge, at about 13.
Owain
I had one too...when I was about 7. Connected to parents' bedroom. It was a pair of field telephones my dad 'won' from the Royal Marine stores.
(I was asthmatic and often needed help in the night...usually an inhaler)
While not 1930s, my Murphy 52B (a member of the B40 family) certainly holds its own with modern receivers for sensitivity. Only problem is, it's not quite portable.
I remember using an old (presumed pre-war) Murphy radio in the mid
60s as a 2MHz transmitter as part of my in and around "Top Band" RT communication experiments with one of my contemporary schoolboy chums who had a similar interest in electronics (in his case, slanted towards electric guitar amplifiers and FX boxes).Sadly now, I can't recall what eventually happened to it - most probably scrapped (it _was_ rather old, dontcha know! - ah, such innocence!. I can't even recall that it had a model number inscribed anywhere - it probably did but the interweb didn't exist back then so no motivation whatsoever to take note.
However, after following the link to the domestic radio memorabilia web page, I came across a poster showing a trade in value chart here:
where I found a close, if not exact, match under the model numbers A48 and D48. The poster pictures don't show enough detail to make a reliable ID.
What I do remember about the set was that it had similar proportions and layout to the A48 / D48 shown in the poster. Afaicr, it was about
18 inches tall, maybe a foot wide and about 8 to 10 inches deep (this is half a century ago now!) and made out of brown bakelite.The tuning scale was on a drum that rotated left to right and vice versa with a vertical cursor line marked on the glass (or just possibly a painted wire strung behind the glass). There were a lot of bands covered, not just LW and MW. it also covered all the shortwave broadcast bands as well.
One interesting feature was that the moving coil loudspeaker (about 6 inch diameter cone) didn't have a permanent magnet to generate the field flux, it used a solenoid winding powered from the HT bias current where it formed part of the HT smoothing circuit.
What made this ideal for conversion into a 2MHz RT transmitter was the phonogram input socket (quarter inch jack with auxiliary contacts to disconnect the demodulator output into the volume control - mono, of course!). This gave me an instant microphone input socket so that the only remaining modifications where to connect the oscillator anode (I presume via a high voltage mica capacitor) to an end fed wire antenna and some means of taking the amplifier signal to the oscillator valve - I suspect I used a low level modulation point, probably the grid or cathode, possibly using the loudspeaker winding on the amplifier output transformer. Whatever I did, it did prove to be effective enough for transmitting AM signals.
Emboldened by my success, I converted a much smaller, and cheaper, valve radio chassis for my friend to talk back to me. I think, by that stage we had moved to another council estate which had not only increased the range from about 300 yards to a mile but also plonked a whacking great car factory in between us. Nevertheless, we were still able to establish a fairly reliable radio link where we experimented with full duplex communication where the biggest issue was avoiding howl round feedback. Happy days!
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