21st Century Buggy Whips

Bob Noel said:
My father and I used to rebuild player pianos. At 83 he isn't able to do that
anymore. There aren't many of us left who know how to rebuild or service
the old player pianos.
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There aren't many guys able to fix anything anymore. It's become a toss-it-and-buy-another society, even for fixable stuff. The guy who can actually fix things is admired.

My son's in-laws had an electric juicer. It quit. They handed it to him, he took it apart, fixed it so it ran, and put it back together. Then he asked them, "What is this thing, anyway?"

Dan
 
Bob Noel said:
Player pianos, not those digital things, but the real player pianos
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I still have one. It's called a "Duo Art Reproducing Piano" and was built in the '20s by the Aeolian Company. The underlying piano is a specially made Steinway Grand. Except for the electric motor driving the air pump the system is entirely pneumatic. It has a tracking control on the music roll to keep the holes in the roll aligned with the "tracker bar" that reads the music. The music roll is driven by a three phase pneumatic motor with slide valves driven by a tiny crankshaft. It also has two "dynamic controls" (theme and accompaniment) which regulate the pressure applied to the bellows which strike the notes. Each dynamic control actually includes a four bit binary digital to analog converter! I suspect that this is the first D to A converter ever designed and built. The two dynamic controls provide the means to play music with the same expression that a skilled pianist would use. Most of the rolls I have contain a picture and signature of the pianist who recorded the piece.

The piano used to belong to my wife's grandfather who took it in lieu of payment from one of his customers. When I got it the mechanism didn't work at all. After tinkering with it for a while I got it working but it clearly needed an overhaul of the flexible portions of the player (tubing and bellows) so I found someone who used to work at the factory and had performed several other overhauls. Prior to finding him most of the musical instrument repair shops and/or piano stores tried to convince me to replace the mechanism with a "modern digital player" that used cassette tapes. I declined their advice.
 
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fgcason said:
I grew up on real playground equipment. Years of rough and tumble on them and I got through it ok. The only time I got the stuffing knocked out of me was on one of those so called safety playgrounds. Flipping plastic coated bar at the exact wrong height and wacked my head hard. Give me the old steel stuff over that so called safety stuff anyday. At least the old stuff acted dangerous so you kept your guard up or got what you deserved. This new tame stuff makes you drop your guard just before measuring your length in the dirt.
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A playground item you won't see anymore is a "teeter-totter". Can anyone remember jumping off at the bottom to let your partner crash hard on the other side?
 
Matthew said:
I was at the gas station today, watched an older guy have to move to another pump because the filler door was on the wrong side. I remember when they used to be under the license plate.
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Some Caddilacs had them behind a hinged "bullet shaped" tail light.
 
Matthew said:
I was at the gas station today, watched an older guy have to move to another pump because the filler door was on the wrong side. I remember when they used to be under the license plate.
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Or under the hood like on my old VW bugs.
 
Speaking of automobile hoods, when did you last see a hood ornament? I remember the "naked" lady on our old Nash.
 
AuntPeggy said:
Speaking of automobile hoods, when did you last see a hood ornament?
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Last summer at an air show/car show.... of course they were "classic" cars. I even took some pictures.
 

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RickH said:
Manual Morse is alive and well in the ham radio world, actually gaining in popularity even though the licensing requirement has been removed. It's also still in use in a variety of other places, though if I mentioned those I'd have to kill you.:nono:

Rick,
CTR2 USNSGA 1968-1972
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160 meter CW contest is going on this weekend. :D
 
RickH said:
Or under the hood like on my old VW bugs.
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My sister had one of them back in the full service days. It was fun to watch them walk around the car a couple of times before we told them were it was.
 
Heath kits.

When was the last time you made your own TV?

sextons,

When was the last time you shot a star?
 
Kids hanging out at the airport hoping for rides,

Pilots giving rides.
 
Gas Wars by service stations...one had premium for 22 cents a gallon, across the street it was 20 cents a gallon...filling up the dodge coronet or the rambler station wagon for $3.00...or how about actual 'service' at the service station...remember the Sinclair dinosaur?
 
... or the Exxon Tiger?

... or the Hamms Bear? (yeah, I know - not gas ... but bear logically follows tiger) :D

... or "Trust your car to the man who wears the star..."
 
Tom-D said:
Heath kits.

When was the last time you made your own TV?

sextons,

When was the last time you shot a star?
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I think you meant "sextant" a sexton is what a church (at least episcopal/anglican) call the janitor.

John
 
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Tom-D said:
Heath kits.

When was the last time you made your own TV?

sextons,

When was the last time you shot a star?
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1974. But the western pond is too big a place to go without manual backup. I'll take mine with me, next P3 flight....thank you....
 
Tom-D said:
Heath kits.

When was the last time you made your own TV?
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For the most part (there were exceptions) Heathkits were some of the most poorly designed bits of electronics ever conceived. I put several together and speak from experience.
 
DutchessFlier said:
Gas Wars by service stations...one had premium for 22 cents a gallon, across the street it was 20 cents a gallon...filling up the dodge coronet or the rambler station wagon for $3.00...or how about actual 'service' at the service station...remember the Sinclair dinosaur?
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Can you remember pulling up to the "service station" and getting a dollar's worth of gas? Often enough to last for a few days if you didn't have to go far. Today of course, a dollar's worth won't budge the fuel gage. Living in a suburb of Detroit, I was often the benfactor of the local "gas wars" and could buy gas for something like 30% less than it was sold for outside the metro area. Supposedly the major oil companies would sell below cost in town and make up the difference upstate but that never made any sense to me.
 
DutchessFlier said:
Gas Wars by service stations...one had premium for 22 cents a gallon, across the street it was 20 cents a gallon...filling up the dodge coronet or the rambler station wagon for $3.00...or how about actual 'service' at the service station...remember the Sinclair dinosaur?
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There's a Sinclair station near me that still has the "Dino" sign, at least it was there the last time I bothered to look.
 
Tom-D said:
When was the last time you made your own TV?
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1981 or 82. My dad was a television repair man with his own business. We built a TV basically from scratch with available parts.

That's another thing that's joining the buggy whips and dinosaurs - repair operations of all kinds such as my dad's business. People throw away perfectly good hardware that only needs a minor fix to be fully operational again. Why repair when you can throw away and get new? Welcome to the age of unnecessary waste.
 
fgcason said:
1981 or 82. My dad was a television repair man with his own business. We built a TV basically from scratch with available parts.

That's another thing that's joining the buggy whips and dinosaurs - repair operations of all kinds such as my dad's business. People throw away perfectly good hardware that only needs a minor fix to be fully operational again. Why repair when you can throw away and get new? Welcome to the age of unnecessary waste.
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When I was a married college student we had no TV (not such a bad thing, really). I noticed an old color TV in a guy's junk trailer outside his year, and asked if I could have it. I had fixed TVs in my high school years, mostly B&W, but so often the failures are relatively simple. With the old tube TVs it was the horizontal amp tube about three quarters of the time. In this one it was one of the color generators, and the transistor that was weak was the same part number that a section of the audio amp used; switching them fixed the color with an almost unnoticeable loss in sound quality.

Now, with all those transistors being microscopic bits hidden in a chip, it gets sorta impossible. It really does become a throw-away device.

Dan

Dan
 
Record stores, video rental stores, and erectile disfunction. I hope they find something for the prostate exam before I hit 40.
 
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How about a darkroom in the basement? Does anybody develop their own film or prints anymore?

I still have the gear, but it's been 20+ years since I've done anything.
 
Ghery said:
I've got an oscilloscope that a neighbor threw away that I fixed simply by resetting the circuit breaker in the back. :D:D
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Reminds me of the time I bought a $600 MSRP audio tuner / amp for the home theatre system, brand new, for $25 off the "it doesn't work, sold as-is" shelf at the local electronics store.

Brought it home, opened it up, and found that they'd forgotten to insert the 15A main in-line fuse at the factory. It wasn't burnt out, it wasn't THERE. Quick trip to Radio Shack, and voila!! Talk about SCORE!
 
gismo said:
For the most part (there were exceptions) Heathkits were some of the most poorly designed bits of electronics ever conceived. I put several together and speak from experience.
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It didn't stop me from drooling over the catalog as a kid!
 
Matthew said:
How about a darkroom in the basement? Does anybody develop their own film or prints anymore?

I still have the gear, but it's been 20+ years since I've done anything.
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Got some gear, but haven't developed in a few years. The school has moved from film to digital for their photography courses... I don't even know if there is a darkroom on campus anymore. :(
 
wbarnhill said:
Got some gear, but haven't developed in a few years. The school has moved from film to digital for their photography courses... I don't even know if there is a darkroom on campus anymore. :(
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One of my jobs when I was going to college was in the campus photolab. Then I had a string of other photolab jobs. I'm not sad to see the chemicals go away. I like digital much better!
 
Re: Writing letters -

When I was in Jr. High, the 'internet' was just starting to become available to mainstream users. At the time, we had a Prodigy account. I got into a 'Pen Pals' message board on there and actually had a few handwritten-letter pen-pals. A couple of them actually stayed in touch for a couple of years.

By the time I was a Senior, I was in live chat rooms with people in Australia with voice chat actually available!! What a difference 4 years can make!

Re: Catalogs -
Sears 'Wishbook'. I still look for it when I go to visit my grandparents around Christmas time. Haven't been able to find it the past couple of years, though. :(

Re: Shadetree mechanicing -
I still wrench on my Jeeps and I even replaced all of the front control arms on my wife's VW Passat a few weeks ago, but now there is something wrong in its electronics - it shutters like the anti-skid control is kicking in. Unfortunately, there probably isn't much I can do to 'wrench' on it to fix it. So I wouldn't say the DIY mechanics are dead, just not as many jobs available for us to do anymore. :(
 
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TangoWhiskey said:
Reminds me of the time I bought a $600 MSRP audio tuner / amp for the home theatre system, brand new, for $25 off the "it doesn't work, sold as-is" shelf at the local electronics store.

Brought it home, opened it up, and found that they'd forgotten to insert the 15A main in-line fuse at the factory. It wasn't burnt out, it wasn't THERE. Quick trip to Radio Shack, and voila!! Talk about SCORE!
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About twenty-five years ago, I found a guy selling a "Space Wars" arcade game for $25. "It powers up OK, but doesn't run" says the guy.

I bought it and brought it home. I was looking into the electronics, and noticed that one of the board connectors had dust on the BOTTOM. I flipped the connector around, and it worked fine....

This isn't mine, but it's the same game:

spacewar.jpg

Ron Wanttaja
 
Dan Thomas said:
When I was a married college student we had no TV (not such a bad thing, really). I noticed an old color TV in a guy's junk trailer outside his year, and asked if I could have it. I had fixed TVs in my high school years, mostly B&W, but so often the failures are relatively simple. With the old tube TVs it was the horizontal amp tube about three quarters of the time. In this one it was one of the color generators, and the transistor that was weak was the same part number that a section of the audio amp used; switching them fixed the color with an almost unnoticeable loss in sound quality.

Now, with all those transistors being microscopic bits hidden in a chip, it gets sorta impossible. It really does become a throw-away device.

Dan

Dan
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I had a flaky color TV that was given to me in college. The red gun was intermittant. We kept a running shoe on the floor next to the TV - that was the "color corrector". Whack the side of the TV at the right place and the color came back. At some point after that became more and more frequent, we spent the $100 for new CRT and fixed the problem for good.

As for 35 mm film, I still use it and like to use it for certain specialty work These days, it's mostly black and white. My opinion may change as I "bond" with my Canon 7D.
 
Flight service station

Happy looking airline pilot

A 4 pack of cigarettes with your airline lunch

Airline lunch

Stewardess

Gum handed out upon descent
 
gismo said:
There's a Sinclair station near me that still has the "Dino" sign, at least it was there the last time I bothered to look.
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Last time I was in Texas (a few years ago) I saw plenty of them there.

gprellwitz said:
and flash bulbs (by strobes)!
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I used to own a camera (that was old at the time) with flash bulbs! I'm sure it's long since found the dumpster. Didn't take good pictures, but it was nifty. I also first started typing on a manual typewriter.
 
I bought a sextant (!:D) this summer and learned celestial navigation.

Why?

Why not?:smile:
 
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