Home Made Project

[Chuckt]

This is an old project from back in the day. I don't know if you can tell but there is a nail in the rotating part.

I seem to think that it might take 24 volts to get this running but I haven't had time to play with it.

This leads me to an interesting question? Mouser was formed in 1964 and Digikey was formed in 1972. Where did people get electronics before then? I know there were vacuum tubes and I'm guessing RCA made some and maybe General Electric as well.

Digikey 1972
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digi-Key

Mouser 1964
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouser_Electronics

Radio Shack 1921
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RadioShack

[brad]

Interesting post Chuck. With you motor picture you made me think of a youtube video that I show to students when we are talking about motors. Here's the video:



That is one impressive home made motor that your Dad made by the way. It looks as though he didn't use any permanent magnets but instead is using electro-magnets for both the rotor and stator. This would make a great training aid because you can see everything about it in great detail.

My Grandad (who died back in 2007) used to work for Telecom (which was Australia's telephone company). I remember that he had loads of scrap reels of wire from his work - there was heaps of the stuff! I think people were a little more thrifty back then in the way you could get parts for your electronic projects Today we get things just by clicking a few buttons!

[Chuckt]

Thank you. I always didn't like the components but people made what they could and they didn't live in a world of 3D printers. The aesthetics look a little less to be desired but it is the engineering that is key.

I always heard people got their start in electronics from Radio or science and this is what I found:

The rectifying property of crystals was discovered in 1874 by Karl Ferdinand Braun,[5][6][7] and crystal detectors were developed and applied to radio receivers in 1904 by Jagadish Chandra Bose,[8][9]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio

Garth suggested Allied which was Allied Radio and there are conflicting dates for them in the United States and they may have been around longer than Radio Shack:

Allied Electronics (Allied Radio) 1928
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_Radio

I just supposed that people bought and played around with Vacuum tubes from General Electric or RCA.

There is a lot more investigating to do to find out the possible answers.

[Garth]

I have some tiny tubes here (slightly larger diameter than a pencil, and under 1.5" long) from Motorola and Raytheon, and I've seen transmitting tubes from Eimac, up to the pair of 3CX35000's that were in a 100 KW transmitter helped install in 1981, which were over a foot in diameter and had a lot of fins around the outside to blow a thousand cubic feet of air through each tube for cooling, as they could dissipate up to 35KW (but dissipated less in our application). These were all metal, with no glass. After transistors came out, I seem to remember there was an issue of one of the electronics magazines introducing nuvistors which were really tiny vacuum tubes to keep tubes in the competition, but that in the same issue, integrated circuits were introduced, sealing the death warrant for tubes.

[Chuckt]

That is one impressive home made motor that your Dad made by the way. It looks as though he didn't use any permanent magnets but instead is using electro-magnets for both the rotor and stator. This would make a great training aid because you can see everything about it in great detail.

Thank you. We almost threw it out because we regarded it as a piece of junk but I saved it because of its engineering, it is built on a "bread board" and it teaches something.

Back in the day, everything was vacuum tubes but what is a vacuum tube that we use today? It is the light bulb. Without the demand for light bulbs, I'm not sure everyone who did electronics would have access to a vacuum to experiment. Thomas Edison and others did a lot to bring us electronics as we know it.

[Garth]

Thomas Edison and others did a lot to bring us electronics as we know it.

A shirt-tail relative is a descendent of Edison, and he as his wife have an impressive Edison museum behind his house about 30 miles from us. It's mostly phonographs, but also has a few of the original light bulbs, plus very early movie projectors and other such things. We've taken the tour a couple of times. They're very active members of the Antique Phonograph Society.

[brad]

Check out this page:

http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2012 ... acuum-tube

It's a couple of years old but they are talking about a hybrid transistor / vacuum tube.

[Chuckt]

Check out this page:

http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2012 ... acuum-tube

It's a couple of years old but they are talking about a hybrid transistor / vacuum tube.

Does Diptrace have the ability to make circuit boards for Vacuum tubes? I looked online and saw that I can still buy vacuum tubes.

My dad made an amplifier from instructions (maybe from the magazine 'Popular Mechanics') and I don't know what happened to it but he played music on it and argued that it had better sound than some of the stereos we have today but I'm not sure he knew all of the reasons why. That article you posted gave me reasons why. It is because the electricity is passing through the tube faster than a solid.

[Garth]

My dad made an amplifier from instructions (maybe from the magazine 'Popular Mechanics') and I don't know what happened to it but he played music on it and argued that it had better sound than some of the stereos we have today but I'm not sure he knew all of the reasons why. That article you posted gave me reasons why. It is because the electricity is passing through the tube faster than a solid.

I think the electrons drift pretty slowly through the space in the tube; but even if they did go somewhat faster, the tube requires them to go much, much farther to get from cathode to plate than transistors require them to go from emitter to collector, or source to drain.

I remember the sound of tube equipment, but when the distortion figures on some transistor amplifiers gets down to .0005%, while the speakers may be well over 1%, I have to say the difference is not from any inferiority of transistors. In the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYTlN6wjcvQ, the speaker in an AES conference meeting tells of having a room full of the "golden ears" enthusiasts and also electronics engineers, half and half, and he's discussing the differences between tube v. solid-state amplifiers. He has a pair of amps there and an A-B switch, and he switches between them as he asks for a vote of which one sounds better. The one group consistently chose the tube amp, while the other chose the solid-state one. What he did not tell them was that the tube amp didn't even work, that both sides of the A-B switch went to the solid-state amp, and that the cords going to the back of the tube amp were only stapled on, not connected electrically. Much of the video debunks the myths that the golden-ears people propagate. YouTube has lossy compression, but he gives the URL where you can download raw wave files.

[brad]

I can't quite remember if it has a valve library built in but you can design you own and intact this guy has made his tube library freely available:

http://www.diptrace.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=156

I too have heard the argument of tube vs solid state and I think it's interesting that they did that test the way they did. Perhaps what would be quite interesting also is if they did another test where they don't tell people which is which and see how they vote.

[Chuckt]

I can't quite remember if it has a valve library built in but you can design you own and intact this guy has made his tube library freely available:

http://www.diptrace.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=156

This is good to know because there are plans on the internet for tube based amplifiers.
I'm guessing you would have to cut holes in perfboard for tubes or find sockets.

[brad]

thats right, it would be a bit tricky with perf board. It could get a bit messy but if you planned it properly, it could be a work of art!

[Chuckt]

That is one impressive home made motor that your Dad made by the way. It looks as though he didn't use any permanent magnets but instead is using electro-magnets for both the rotor and stator. This would make a great training aid because you can see everything about it in great detail.

I remember him saying he used a magnet to magnetize the nail but without a compass, I wouldn't know which side is positive or negative without studying electricity.

He didn't want to plug it into a toy train transformer because he didn't want to lose a transformer or start a fire. I'll take his word for it because it could cause resistance which could cause a fire.

I have no plans to run this motor but if I did, I would use a couple of lantern batteries because that might be the safest way. I don't want readers here to be fooled. There is a lot of punch in your car battery and a D battery is all you need to stop a heart.

[Garth]

Try it with a bench power supply with current limiting.