Painting a Bakelite radio cabinet

On 9/28/2017 5:09 PM, Jim Mueller wrote:
Jeff was lucky, his capacitors failed quickly while he still had the
radio apart. My experience was different, each one lasted months, so I
ended up taking the set apart numerous times to replace one capacitor
each time. I learned from that, now I replace them all at one go.
The Artone was the third set I worked once I decide I was going to play
with old radios. The first was a Signatone code practice oscillator and
every cap and resistor was bad in it. The second was a Columbia phono,
AC/DC/Battery portable with a wind up clockwork mechanism.

After about ten years of playing with vintage tube gear, I opened a shop
to do this for profit. This means when you fix a radio, it has to stay
fixed once it goes out the door.

> But if you like taking things apart repeatedly, that's up to you.

"You can't fix stupid."

--
Jeff-1.0
wa6fwi
http://www.foxsmercantile.com
 
On 28 Sep 2017 22:09:50 GMT, Jim Mueller <wrongname@nospam.com> wrote:

Jeff was lucky, his capacitors failed quickly while he still had the
radio apart. My experience was different, each one lasted months, so I
ended up taking the set apart numerous times to replace one capacitor
each time. I learned from that, now I replace them all at one go. But
if you like taking things apart repeatedly, that's up to you.

Considering my age, it probably dont matter, but I bet all the modern
caps will fail in far less time than those old paper caps. Nothing these
days is made as well as in the old days. Caps that are still working
after 70 years were not poorly made. I think a lot of that was because
in those days, people had respect for their customers, anad wanted the
name of their company to stand out. That was before our "throw away
society". That is no longer the case.

Add to that, the fact that most caps are now made in China, and I know
they wont last. I try to get all NOS Orange Drop caps. They were made in
the USA and were top of the line. They cost more, but are the only ones
I consider worth buying.
 
On Friday, 29 September 2017 03:31:04 UTC+1, olds...@tubes.com wrote:
On 28 Sep 2017 22:09:50 GMT, Jim Mueller <wrongname@nospam.com> wrote:

Jeff was lucky, his capacitors failed quickly while he still had the
radio apart. My experience was different, each one lasted months, so I
ended up taking the set apart numerous times to replace one capacitor
each time. I learned from that, now I replace them all at one go. But
if you like taking things apart repeatedly, that's up to you.

Considering my age, it probably dont matter, but I bet all the modern
caps will fail in far less time than those old paper caps. Nothing these
days is made as well as in the old days. Caps that are still working
after 70 years were not poorly made. I think a lot of that was because
in those days, people had respect for their customers, anad wanted the
name of their company to stand out. That was before our "throw away
society". That is no longer the case.

Add to that, the fact that most caps are now made in China, and I know
they wont last. I try to get all NOS Orange Drop caps. They were made in
the USA and were top of the line. They cost more, but are the only ones
I consider worth buying.

Capacior reliability is another topic to learn about. The 3 unreliable types are electrolytic, paper and multilayer ceramic. Other types are extremely reliable. Unfortunately most 1950s or earlier small caps are paper, and most are well & truly shot now. Replacing old papers with new plastic film is a big reliability & longevity upgrade.


NT
 
On 9/28/2017 8:29 PM, oldschool@tubes.com wrote:
Considering my age, it probably dont matter, but I bet all the modern
caps will fail in far less time than those old paper caps. Nothing these
days is made as well as in the old days. Caps that are still working
after 70 years were not poorly made. I think a lot of that was because
in those days, people had respect for their customers, anad wanted the
name of their company to stand out. That was before our "throw away
society". That is no longer the case.

Of for fuck's sake.
You are one ignorant son of a bitch.

Caps made "back then" were made with non-archival, i.e. acid bearing
paper. They were sealed with bee's way which was hygroscopic. Moisture
reacted with the acid in the paper and that was the end of that.

Modern capacitors are made with a metalized mylar film and have a
service life measured in hundreds if not thousands of years.

Modern electrolytic capacitors have improved 10 fold over the years.

Add to that, the fact that most caps are now made in China, and I know
they wont last. I try to get all NOS Orange Drop caps. They were made in
the USA and were top of the line. They cost more, but are the only ones
I consider worth buying.

"A fool and his money are soon parted."

While you're at it, why not buy NOS Black Beauty capacitors.


--
Jeff-1.0
wa6fwi
http://www.foxsmercantile.com
 
On Thursday, September 28, 2017 at 10:31:04 PM UTC-4, olds...@tubes.com wrote:

Add to that, the fact that most caps are now made in China, and I know
they wont last.


LOL! You *are* one stupid son of a bitch. There, I said it.

Even the worse plastic caps will outlast any paper and wax cap (one exception for another thread). I've been using these Chinese caps to restore old radios for 20 years and not one has failed. But by all means, keep using those paper caps and destroy tubes and transformers that are no longer in production - in *any* country...

And even if you were to believe your own bullshit, do you really think caps that are already 70 years old have any reliability left in them, more than a brand new Chinese plastic cap?

Jeff says you can't fix stupid. My older brother says you can fix stupid but you can't fix *really* stupid. I think you qualify as the latter.
 
A bit of history might help you understand things. Once upon a time, light switches and receptacles were designed to be able to handle AC and DC. What happens when switching DC? Arcing. So, switches and receptacles, and switches in everything from lamps to toaster had to be arc-resistant. In addition, manufacturers did not have 100 years of historical data to design from. So, things were over-designed (by modern standards), heavy (by modern standards) and many have withstood the test of time and survive to this day. Today, switches are either AC or DC, designed to very specific standards, and as long as they are used within those standards, will also last indefinitely.

Capacitors started as foil-and-glass devices, evolving to foil-and-paper (cheap) sealed with paraffin wax + some bees wax for workability (cheap), and some were potted in tar (even then, manufacturers understood that the materials had self-decay problems) and various other methods were tried - and discarded over time. BUT, remember, EVERYTHING WAS NEW back in those days. Nobody had 100+ years of data to use, and what we understand today as being very short blind alleys were enticing options. So, there is a LOT of crap out there that was perfectly functional when made. Electrolytics evolved similarly and improved similarly. As did resistors, even tubes. Nuvistors, developed about the same times as reliable transistors, were thought then, and perhaps still, to have a pretty-much indefinite service-life as compared to a standard tube.

So, now the evolution of consumer-grade electronic components, caps, resistors, transistors, and so forth, has made them into commodities based on unprotected (no patent protection) technology using cheap-as-hell materials and largely automated manufacturing processes operating at a precision that was not possible back-then. Meaning that a Visay-Sprague has no competitive advantage over the Grace L. Furgeson storm-door and capacitor company, or the Wa-Chen capacitor company operating out of a garage in Shanghai. But that Wa-Chen capacitor is superior in every way to the Sprague wax-paper cap produced in 1947. Or that plastic-encapsulated cap produced by Philco in 1961.

You really need to step back and take a 20,000 view of this hobby. Don't plant your feet 'back in the day' as you *DO* have 100 years of data to pull from, and you *DO* have the opportunity to bypass the mistakes of others and go directly to the proper solution. There is not one person in 20 that understands the sequence of events necessary for the lamp in their ceiling fixture to light up at the flick of a switch. They take it for granted. Back in the day, that simple result was the nearest thing to magic the world had ever experienced. If you understand how we got here, you need not repeat the mistakes, or duplicate the errors, or repeat the learning process as experienced over the last 100 years. Save yourself the pain.

Otherwise the appearance of idiocy you seem to cultivate so carefully may, in fact, be your reality. That would be sad.

Peter Wieck
Melrose Park, PA
 
Thursday, Sept. 28, 2017 at 10:31PM, olds...@tubes.com wrote:
Add to that, the fact that most caps are now made in China, and I know
they wont last.

Can you tell where the rest are made?
 
On Wed, 27 Sep 2017 11:41:25 -0700 (PDT), "pfjw@aol.com"
<pfjw@aol.com> wrote:

On Tuesday, September 26, 2017 at 7:16:44 PM UTC-4, Dave Platt wrote:
Actually, consider the additional i in Aluminium, and all those Us such as colour, behaviour an more, going on since the days of Shakespeare and before.
If you allow a cost of GBP 0.01/100 such extra letters, and for round figures consider that the average number of printed & written such letters is around two billion per year, that comes to GBP 200,000 per year. Since about 1590. Consider the miracle of compound interest - and what that would be worth today, not including all the additional years. What a waste!
That initial 200,000 would be worth GBP 807,434,220 +/- today. Boggles the mind.
http://www.angelfire.com/va3/timshenk/codes/meihem.html
Peter Wieck
Melrose Park, PA

Well, if alphabetic economy is needed, may I suggest switching to
Hebrew instead. Hebrew has only 22 letters, no vowels, and 5778 years
of experience and testing. For situations where vowels might be
useful, they can optionally be attached to letters as niqqud:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niqqud>
In all, Hebrew would make a suitably economical replacement for the
Kings English.

Another problem is conserving white space. White space is not really
necessary. For example, ancient Greek did not have any extra spaces
or symbols between words.
<http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ExsXKuhO3NY/VHl1-iCdAnI/AAAAAAAAAHU/tPPKQ7EHsXI/s1600/794px-St%C3%A8le_grecque.jpg>
The supply of white space is limited and in danger of extinction. When
we run out of white space, allthewordswillruntogether.

--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
 
On Sat, 30 Sep 2017 09:43:03 -0700, Jeff Liebermann wrote:

The supply of white space is limited and in danger of extinction.
When we run out of white space, allthewordswillruntogether.

Entropy's effect would seem to create just the opposite -- whitespace
ever expanding until e v e n l e t t e r s w i l l b e
t o o f a r a p a r t t o
r e l a t e t o e a c h
o t h e r .

Jonesy
--
Marvin L Jones | Marvin | W3DHJ.net | linux
38.238N 104.547W | @ jonz.net | Jonesy | FreeBSD
* Killfiling google & XXXXbanter.com: jonz.net/ng.htm
 
On 30 Sep 2017 20:47:43 GMT, Allodoxaphobia
<knock_yourself_out@example.net> wrote:

On Sat, 30 Sep 2017 09:43:03 -0700, Jeff Liebermann wrote:
The supply of white space is limited and in danger of extinction.
When we run out of white space, allthewordswillruntogether.

Entropy's effect would seem to create just the opposite -- whitespace
ever expanding until e v e n l e t t e r s w i l l b e
t o o f a r a p a r t t o
r e l a t e t o e a c h
o t h e r .

Jonesy

That's not entropy, which is the tendency for all attempts to organize
this newsgroup to turn into randomized rubbish. It's also not the
expansion of the universe, which would increase the font size along
with the inter-character spacing. After all the great ideas are
eliminated, whatever is left, no matter how dumb, must be the cause.
In this case, it's caused by authors being paid by the page. In the
distant past, authors were paid by the word. This resulted in
numerous abrevs, contractions, and hypenations to increase the word
count.

However, it was tedious to count words. So, publishers changed to
counting pages instead. That changed the style sheet to gigantic
fonts, absurdly wide margins, margin notes, double and triple spaced
lines, two spaces between sentences, a heading on every page, and
footnotes that nobody reads. What's important is that the tool to
make all this happen is the white space character. Prior to these
changes, the worlds supply of white space was adequate for all forms
of publication. Afterwards, the supply of white space began to
diminish. That happened to me, when I pressed the space bar, and
nothing happened. I quickly inserted a flash drive full of empty
space, which allowed me to continue writing. However, that's only
temporary as AGW alarmists are already proclaiming impending doom.
Little wonder that NASA is trying to resurrect the space program, so
that we can replenish our supply of white space from outer space.

Unfortunately, I do not have an answer to the white space depletion
problem. Conservation is only a temporary measure. Eventually, we
will run out of white space resulting in the implosion of all written
text and the rationing of white space. It might be possible to use
black paper and white printing because unlike the supply of white
space, there's plenty of black space available inside the nearest
black hole.

--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
 
In article <8u00tctv79ojubncfvg902lfdqmrjts1nq@4ax.com>,
jeffl@cruzio.com says...
In this case, it's caused by authors being paid by the page. In the
distant past, authors were paid by the word. This resulted in
numerous abrevs, contractions, and hypenations to increase the word
count.

That reminds me of my invention of logarithmically-lined paper because
there is always just a few extra lines of writing which (when we used to
do long-hand) just needed to be fitted in to that last page...

Mike.
 
Mike Coon wrote on 9/30/2017 7:11 PM:
In article <8u00tctv79ojubncfvg902lfdqmrjts1nq@4ax.com>,
jeffl@cruzio.com says...

In this case, it's caused by authors being paid by the page. In the
distant past, authors were paid by the word. This resulted in
numerous abrevs, contractions, and hypenations to increase the word
count.

That reminds me of my invention of logarithmically-lined paper because
there is always just a few extra lines of writing which (when we used to
do long-hand) just needed to be fitted in to that last page...

That one was pretty good! You should get that patented. lol

--

Rick C

Viewed the eclipse at Wintercrest Farms,
on the centerline of totality since 1998
 
On Tue, 26 Sep 2017 18:43:35 -0400, rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> wrote:

tabbypurr@gmail.com wrote on 9/26/2017 6:31 PM:
On Tuesday, 26 September 2017 22:14:42 UTC+1, rickman wrote:

It all depends on the details. I used a paint for plastic to use on a
plastic container and it did not work well at all. I cleaned the surface
well, but did not rough it up and did not use a primer. It was not too long
before the paint started to peel. I don't know the type of plastic. It was
a food storage container with a seal ring commonly available in stores.
Just a data point for what it is worth.

Nothing sticks to polythene.

That should be poly-mumble-ene.

Are you in the UK? Is that what we call polyethylene? How does it happen
that we end up with different names for things like common plastic?

There are naming standards for chemicals and compounds which I believe
includes plastics. Chemists are amazingly human (and childish) in
their naming of various compounds. There are enough examples to fill
a Wikipedia article:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chemical_compounds_with_unusual_names>

Should you ever be in a position to assign a name, please resist the
temptation to be excessively clever. I didn't. Because I had one
foot in engineering and the other in marketing, I was honored with the
task of assigning a model number of a marine radio that I helped
design. Most of the other radios followed the pattern COM1, COM3,
COM21, etc (this was before the IBM PC serial ports used the same
designation). Without the slightest hesitation, I proclaimed that
COM1C will be the next model number. It was about a week before
anyone noticed the obvious. I soon became a candidate for immediate
execution by those who had to rewrite the product releases and hastily
retrieve those had been mailed.



--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
 
On Sat, 30 Sep 2017 19:22:29 -0700, Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@cruzio.com>
wrote:

There are naming standards for chemicals and compounds which I believe
includes plastics.

Polyethylene isn't the only plastic with some naming confusion. See
table 2:
<https://books.google.com/books?id=wmohBQAAQBAJ&pg=PR26>


--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
 
On Fri, 29 Sep 2017 05:23:32 -0700 (PDT), "pfjw@aol.com"
<pfjw@aol.com> wrote:

A bit of history might help you understand things. Once upon a time, light switches and receptacles were designed to be able to handle AC and DC. What happens when switching DC? Arcing. So, switches and receptacles, and switches in everything from lamps to toaster had to be arc-resistant. In addition, manufacturers did not have 100 years of historical data to design from. So, things were over-designed (by modern standards), heavy (by modern standards) and many have withstood the test of time and survive to this day. Today, switches are either AC or DC, designed to very specific standards, and as long as they are used within those standards, will also last indefinitely.

Capacitors started as foil-and-glass devices, evolving to foil-and-paper (cheap) sealed with paraffin wax + some bees wax for workability (cheap), and some were potted in tar (even then, manufacturers understood that the materials had self-decay problems) and various other methods were tried - and discarded over time. BUT, remember, EVERYTHING WAS NEW back in those days. Nobody had 100+ years of data to use, and what we understand today as being very short blind alleys were enticing options. So, there is a LOT of crap out there that was perfectly functional when made. Electrolytics evolved similarly and improved similarly. As did resistors, even tubes. Nuvistors, developed about the same times as reliable transistors, were thought then, and perhaps still, to have a pretty-much indefinite service-life as compared to a standard tube.

So, now the evolution of consumer-grade electronic components, caps, resistors, transistors, and so forth, has made them into commodities based on unprotected (no patent protection) technology using cheap-as-hell materials and largely automated manufacturing processes operating at a precision that was not possible back-then. Meaning that a Visay-Sprague has no competitive advantage over the Grace L. Furgeson storm-door and capacitor company, or the Wa-Chen capacitor company operating out of a garage in Shanghai. But that Wa-Chen capacitor is superior in every way to the Sprague wax-paper cap produced in 1947. Or that plastic-encapsulated cap produced by Philco in 1961.

You really need to step back and take a 20,000 view of this hobby. Don't plant your feet 'back in the day' as you *DO* have 100 years of data to pull from, and you *DO* have the opportunity to bypass the mistakes of others and go directly to the proper solution. There is not one person in 20 that understands the sequence of events necessary for the lamp in their ceiling fixture to light up at the flick of a switch. They take it for granted. Back in the day, that simple result was the nearest thing to magic the world had ever experienced. If you understand how we got here, you need not repeat the mistakes, or duplicate the errors, or repeat the learning process as experienced over the last 100 years. Save yourself the pain.

Otherwise the appearance of idiocy you seem to cultivate so carefully may, in fact, be your reality. That would be sad.

Peter Wieck
Melrose Park, PA

I agree with everything you say except for nuvistor reliability. We
were constantly replacing them in RCA tuners back in the early 70s.

---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus
 
On Monday, October 2, 2017 at 9:52:23 AM UTC-4, Chuck wrote:

I agree with everything you say except for nuvistor reliability. We
were constantly replacing them in RCA tuners back in the early 70s.

Agreed that the very earliest did suffer from poor QC. But after a pretty short shakedown, they became exceedingly reliable. The biggest problem with them was either a poor vacuum (no getters, no way to draw out air by individual tube) or loss of vacuum. As the technology progressed, these were solved to the point that were they as inexpensive as contemporary transistors, they may have survived in volume production to this day. They were very costly as compared to solid-state devices, however.

Peter Wieck
Melrose Park, PA
 
On Sat, 30 Sep 2017 20:38:11 -0400, rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> wrote:

Mike Coon wrote on 9/30/2017 7:11 PM:
In article <8u00tctv79ojubncfvg902lfdqmrjts1nq@4ax.com>,
jeffl@cruzio.com says...

In this case, it's caused by authors being paid by the page. In the
distant past, authors were paid by the word. This resulted in
numerous abrevs, contractions, and hypenations to increase the word
count.

That reminds me of my invention of logarithmically-lined paper because
there is always just a few extra lines of writing which (when we used to
do long-hand) just needed to be fitted in to that last page...

That one was pretty good! You should get that patented. lol

Yep. I like it. I did some searching through various online patent
search databases and did not find anything even close. Plenty of
semi-log paper graphs, but nothing suitable for writing. They all
have the necessary semi-log horizontal lines, but they also have
equally spaced vertical lines, which makes it difficult to use as
writing paper.

I think it just might be patentable. No clue how you're going to sell
the idea to a manufacturer of rules writing paper. It's far too easy
to clone and steal:
<https://www.google.com/search?q=ruled+writing+paper&tbm=isch>
<http://objective.restrictions.us/lined-paper>

In honor of the cats that like to plant themselves at the center of
attention:
<https://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/lined-paper-doodles-art-interactive-4__605.jpg>

--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
 
In article <i688tc5ulv81b4kdkna6lolvbgc541978f@4ax.com>,
jeffl@cruzio.com says...
Yep. I like it. I did some searching through various online patent
search databases and did not find anything even close. Plenty of
semi-log paper graphs, but nothing suitable for writing. They all
have the necessary semi-log horizontal lines, but they also have
equally spaced vertical lines, which makes it difficult to use as
writing paper.

I think it just might be patentable. No clue how you're going to sell
the idea to a manufacturer of rules writing paper. It's far too easy
to clone and steal:
https://www.google.com/search?q=ruled+writing+paper&tbm=isch
http://objective.restrictions.us/lined-paper

If you like researching patents, I have another one for you. This was a
joint invention with a colleague, also decades ago, and mostly about
coming up with the name...

"Panickers" (panic + knickers). An incontinence garment specifically to
cope with the gut impact of sudden fright!

Mike.
 
The issue is not the number of letters/symbols in an alphabet.
The issue is not the amount of white space on a page.
The issue is all about clarity of communication.

Symbols that increase clarity or reduce the potential for confusion are good.
Symbols that are there based merely on form or tradition do neither.

The additional i does nothing for Aluminium.
The additional u does nothing for Colour, Behaviour et.al.

Tongue firmly in cheek.

By the way, Surveyors have been using a decimal scale for hundreds of years (since 1620) - the Chain Scale. In the US, the Ramsden Scale (1785) divided feet into 10ths, and Chain Scale tapes are still used by surveyors to this day -those not using GPS devices, that is. Note that most surveyor measurements are in decimals.

Ain't history fun?

Peter Wieck
Melrose Park, PA
 

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