(Musings about the projects on my workbench) When I'm not hanging with my wife and adult kids, playing with the granddaughter or working... I live from project to project. DIY home projects, restoration projects, woodworking projects, audio recording projects, audio hi-fi projects. So I decided to create a regular Blog post about what project is on my bench... Here is the first entry.
I completed the Hickok 533A Tube Tester over Thanksgiving weekend (originally an Ampex engineering unit in Redwood City, CA - click the link and look it up)
As a Christmas present to myself, I started a full restoration of a Wurlitzer 2400s that I have owned since 1987. It was given to me by Steve Partee a fellow engineer at Ampex. back in 1987 I made it functional. It had a home made power supply, a Sansui amp, and was missing many other components like the coin mechanism, the title card holder (the record names and selection numbers). Nevertheless I had it working and for about 18 years the kids played it and enjoyed the range of records it curated. The kid’s headed off to college, graduated, started life, mom and dad sold the homestead. But I kept the Jukebox. Over the past 10 years I collected many of the missing components. I now had an original coin mechanism, power supply, amplifier (tube type of course), and I located a set of title card holders. For the past 8 weeks I have worked on it in between fun with my Granddaughter, a trip to Beijing and multiple trips to San Francisco and L.A. Today it is almost full functional, polished and soon will come down off the bench (well in this case some custom sized saw horses). The last item to work on is that it developed a 60 cycle buzz in one channel. Some leaky capacitor in the power system must be causing trouble. I’m ready to power it up and introduce my Grandaughter to the fun that music from a jukebox can be….. then tell her about the good ole days. 🙂
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