Flea market finds

[Kidd]

I went to the flea market yesterday and picked up a few things

1950's Emkay remembrance lite

also a civil defense geiger counter


unfortunately it is for high level radiation. So useless. Only useful after nuclear disaster. If you do happen to get a reading off of it your going to need to seek medical attention ASAP or just get in your hearse and drive yourself to the grave yard.
I also got small hewing hatchet made by L&I,J White they made blades from 1837 to 1905

I like it nice stout lil hatchet. I call it my skull cleaver.

I couldn't get pics to work so oh well try and get pics and post them later

[sgath92]

also a civil defense geiger counter

Be aware that Cold War Geiger counters had a source sample attached to them for testing the unit.

On the side there will be a metal plate with some information on the unit [i.e. a model # and/or serial #, etc]. Notice how there is a black circle in the center of it? That's because they put a radioactive source directly under that circle. So it is very important not to disturb the source.

If the counter does not detect the source, it likely needs an electrical restoration. You can expect most of the capacitors & rectifiers [if applicable] to be dead by now.

[Guest]

@sarah, what do you do for a living? are you an engineer of some sort?

[sgath92]

I have a background in historical research, focusing on military history. My family has been involved in DOD contracting for approx 150 years, so growing up I would spend most of my free time hanging around my grandfather in his workshop where he would take electronics [military or civ] he found interesting & restore them so they could be donated to museums. The Smithsonian, Schenectady Museum, Antique Wireless Association Museum, Henry Ford Museum etc., all have in their collections things he had done in his spare time during the 70s-90s. It kind of evolved from "since you're sitting there you might as well help me with _" until I started picking it up. Then when his health deteriorated I inherited his shop's contents. For example I have this sitting around right now:




Which I believe is the control unit for a MK 67 GFCS prototype.

My grandfather was in intelligence during WW2 before becoming a nuclear engineer, which was how he got recruited into GE. In the 50s GE built E-Lab [part of "Syracuse Electronics Parkway"], which was where they did their electrical/magnetism R&D for defense work. He was there for all but the last two years of the facility [its now Lockheed Martin last I heard], where he did GE's R&D for the apollo program, the flying Gatlin gun known as the A-10, ICBMs, various navy nuclear reactors, earth-moon-earth radio, radar, and a long list of things I can't talk about. As recent as two years ago I would not be able to speak publicly of this: As fate would have it, my stepdad was a spook on a sistership to the USS Liberty. Despite his dad having been a known spy for the Soviet Union [Security clearances, how do they work?]. So many interesting stories.

[Guest]

[Security clearances, how do they work?]

i think we can infer that they don't work from recent high publicity cases.

That sounds like an awesome activity for fun and profit.

[sgath92]

Back when those cold war AGTR's were being used to carry out surveillance, their purposes were kept classified [and still were up until a couple years ago]. The "official" cover story they gave them was that it was off the coast of hostile areas like Vietnam during the war to... study sunspots. Did they think anyone would actually believe that!? So you had these unarmed ships covered with state of the art surveillance equipment, with most [if not all] world governments knowing what their real purpose was & that they could not defend themselves, so its no surprise that the Liberty or the Pueblo had each of their fates play out the way it did. The question is whether it was incompetence, or intentional under the idea that it could be used to manufacture excuses for military interventions around the world [like the Gulf of Tonkins, that Admiral Stockdale went to his death bed insisting never even happened].

Snowden & Manning were probably not pre-planed events, but I would not be surprised if they fit into a strange Game Theory contingency plan for rolling out new regulations for cracking down on leaks, dissidents, and funding of intelligence infrastructure expansions. After all the lasting effects of these leaks have been pretty negligible, with the vast majority of the world unwilling to change their behavior to make spying on them more difficult & most countries [who have their own intelligence programs] putting on dramatic but not-really serious protests to keep their constituents happy.

[Guest]

There is an abandoned old school house close by here with tons of vacuum-tube era electronics and military avionic equipment.

[sgath92]

There is an abandoned old school house close by here with tons of vacuum-tube era electronics and military avionic equipment.

A lot of that stuff is worth decent $$, depending on what it is.

The biggest factor in values is what the hobbyists in Asia find interesting. Ever since Japan's boom years in the 80s there's a lot of people in Asia who build their own audio equipment, but since its more about bragging power than actual performance, their buying habits are irrational & seemingly random. But there's enough heavy spenders over there that its caused global shortages of whatever becomes popular with them.

In the west, there's something similar going on with musicians. There's all these baby boomers [w/ a disposable income] who romanticize the rock & roll era & think they too can sound like they remember if only they use identical equipment. Ok, fair enough. But most of the time that equipment has to be restored. A rational person would approach that from a scientific/technical perspective. An irrational person would insist that it can only be done with "authentic 60s era components" & the buy fake "retro" capacitors from Gibson [which are nothing more than modern capacitors hidden inside a plastic casing to look old]. There are enough irrational people trying to reclaim their faded youth that Gibson can get away with charging a hundred bucks for a $.50 modern capacitor. Meanwhile used [almost 100% sure to be dead] pulled-60s capacitors in the right values have gone for hundreds of dollars on eBay.

Maybe its, oh I don't know, talent, that really determines how good something sounds.

[LMS]

There is an abandoned old school house close by here with tons of vacuum-tube era electronics and military avionic equipment.

Some place we can go into? or is it closed up?

[Guest]

Some place we can go into? or is it closed up?

Well, it's a lot harder to get into unnoticed now because there are house trailers right next to it, and it is private property with "no trespassing" signs.

[Guest]

In the west, there's something similar going on with musicians.

we in the guitar community call those types of people "cork sniffers."

[Psychoholic]

I deem this to be the most interesting thread on here in a while.

MORE STORIES!!

What other types of devices did he restore? Did he work on any civilian stuff you can talk about?

[sgath92]

Did he work on any civilian stuff you can talk about?

All kinds of things. E-Lab did the R&D work for all of GE's digital alarm clocks, and I actually have in storage the prototype my grandfather built for what was the company's first red display digital alarm clock plus his lab notes on it. I specified the color because GE's favorite color is blue, and most of their 70s & 80s digital alarm clocks actually had blue displays instead of the red that has become the default. He brought a blue-display one home from work sometime in the 70s and used it up until 2 years ago when I inherited it that has an external temperature probe. If you push a button on the clock it would give you a temperature reading [the idea was you'd put the probe outside], which is what I am using to monitor the temperatures in my snake's tank. I have been watching eBay and I've yet to see one come up with the temperature probe so I am guessing most of them have long since been lost. 30-40 years & going isn't bad for a temp sensor, maybe the automakers should be buying them from GE.




Dust, dust everywhere.

[sgath92]

But my favorite story from my grandfather's workshop is about his WW2 radio. Its the top black-thing in one of his two communication racks:


During WW2 the BC-348 was meant to be used in bombers, running off 28v but some radio operators in Army HQ Companies [that would be my grandfather] got them for use in the field. My grandfather liked his so much that when the war ended he bought it off the army & shipped it home. Which means I know it saw action in both theatres. These radios intentionally left out the AM-band so the soldiers wouldn't be trying to listen to music or radio shows instead of working.

One night in the late 90s I was at his place fairly late. Around 9pm is the start of what they call "skip distance" which is when radio waves bounce off the atmosphere in a strange way, allowing you to receive signals from far further away than you can under normal circumstances. I had gotten bored and flipped on the radio and started trying to find something interesting to listen to. First thing I come across is in English, with some guy saying [something] [something] this is Radio Tokyo signing off for the night [Japanese national anthem] then dead silence.

The problem with this is that there is no "Radio Tokyo" anymore. Radio Tokyo was a short wave station that was on the air during the war years. During US occupation they were dismantled & used as relays for US radio broadcasts, and when the Japanese were finally given permission to start doing international broadcasts again they used the name NHK [their version of the BBC]. So I turned a couple shades paler, thought it was time to GTFO of the basement and didn't touch that haunted radio again for years.

[sgath92]

This is more of an ebay-find,



Ball Brothers is known for; masonry jars. During the 50s they decided to go into military contracting because well, it was the cold war & everyone else was doing it. So they started a division called "Ball Aerospace & Technologies" that still exists & still does NASA type DOD contracts. You wouldn't think that has anything to do with making glass jars for home canning, but then again:

What this is, is an RF monitoring circuit. You'd set it to receive a station, and if the station ever goes off the air it will trigger the alarm. During the 50s & 60s just about every radio station had one of these, and likely many military installations. Having a station go offline immediately cuts into profits during peacetime, and during wartime it would be essential to keep every possible station online for as long as possible to coordinate the civilians in a post nuclear apocalyptic world where the living would envy the dead & civilization would quickly start to crumble.

In the pre-transitor days the equipment could survive direct EMPs without the need for faraday shielding, and most of our commercial AM stations were built so well that you only really needed one of them to survive the bombs to continue radio broadcasting for the entire North American continent. Many countries had & still have SW stations that broadcast jibberish 24/7 as a way of showing whether the facility has been taken out. If a signal disappears & its coming from a secret off-shore base full of nuclear missiles you have a problem.