# Another score



## macfixer01 (Jan 14, 2012)

I drove out to pick these boards up earlier this week. The large cabinet with the brown ribbon cable connectors, the big box full of smaller boards with normal edge fingers, and tape reader were a surprise (While you're here, would you be interested in this too for $50?) item. I haven't pulled the cabinet apart yet to see what's inside but from what I can see in there it looks nice.

macfixer01


----------



## Anonymous (Jan 14, 2012)

That is some aweful nice looking stuff there!


----------



## AlZabrisky (Jan 14, 2012)

Grats. Some good looking high yield boards.


----------



## glorycloud (Jan 14, 2012)

I'm not an expert but the the six glass tubes in the third picture
may be worth some money. Vacuum tubes? Nixie tubes? 

Be careful with them until you check the out. Send the other junk
to me, it all looks like really low grade stuff. :lol:


----------



## element47 (Jan 14, 2012)

Oooh, ooh, ooh, Nixie tubes! Big fetish item. Try to keep that whole board that supports them intact (presumably with the decoding circuitry) and if possible, the tinted plastic window in the front panel, and sell them as one unit on ebay. It's not that the decode circuitry is of great value, what is of value (to the fetishists) is the SOCKETS those Nixies are in (incredibly hard to get) and the fact that they are evenly spaced and pre-mounted on a board that is an easy thing to deal with....mechanically, in terms of mounting them neatly, in a line. 

I'm not seeing good pix of the "brown cabinet" you speak of. Throw up some more pix, I probably won't want them/it but maybe I can help you get some more $$ for it/that/them. 

People like those Nixie tubes to make clocks out of. I think it's goofy, if you don't have one you can go buy a brand new LED clock with alarm and the buzzer for $8 new, $1-2 from the thrift store, $11 with a radio, and it doesn't need a 100-volt power supply. I kind of like the 'scope clocks that people make, but geez, now you have have a 1000-2000 volt power supply to light the thing up, and it's big, consumes power, and is a breakage hazard. (Google Images: "scope clocks", "nixie clocks") Cool, though.


----------



## Smack (Jan 14, 2012)

element47 said:


> People like those Nixie tubes to make clocks out of.




Same thing with A-bottom residential watt hour meters being made into lamps. Got about 10 of those along with the other 200 not so valuble ones to strip down.


----------



## macfixer01 (Jan 15, 2012)

element47 said:


> Oooh, ooh, ooh, Nixie tubes! Big fetish item. Try to keep that whole board that supports them intact (presumably with the decoding circuitry) and if possible, the tinted plastic window in the front panel, and sell them as one unit on ebay. It's not that the decode circuitry is of great value, what is of value (to the fetishists) is the SOCKETS those Nixies are in (incredibly hard to get) and the fact that they are evenly spaced and pre-mounted on a board that is an easy thing to deal with....mechanically, in terms of mounting them neatly, in a line.
> 
> I'm not seeing good pix of the "brown cabinet" you speak of. Throw up some more pix, I probably won't want them/it but maybe I can help you get some more $$ for it/that/them.
> 
> People like those Nixie tubes to make clocks out of. I think it's goofy, if you don't have one you can go buy a brand new LED clock with alarm and the buzzer for $8 new, $1-2 from the thrift store, $11 with a radio, and it doesn't need a 100-volt power supply. I kind of like the 'scope clocks that people make, but geez, now you have have a 1000-2000 volt power supply to light the thing up, and it's big, consumes power, and is a breakage hazard. (Google Images: "scope clocks", "nixie clocks") Cool, though.




Yeah I seem to be collecting a lot of nixie tubes. I still have about 30 I cleaned up and continuity tested once, I had a good offer on them then got lazy and never followed through. I probably have close to 80 now. Unfortunately the tubes I get are all a little grimy from cutting oil and dust in machine shop environments. They clean up nicely just wiping them down with alcohol but it also tends to remove the manufacturer markings. Maybe I'll just put the whole lot of tubes together on Ebay, uncleaned and untested. I don't know how much they're worth really, since I believe the Russians are still manufacturing some types pretty cheaply? I may scrap at least the one nixie driver board since as you can see in the picture it has some gold pinned chips on it.

Regarding the brown cabinet, I attached a better picture. I don't know why I said brown, the parts that are painted are actually more of a beige color. It's a different type of CNC controller made by Westinghouse. I'm referring to the big unit with a bunch of white buttons and the cardboard box sitting on top of it. It has seven 4-plug brown ribbon cables visible and there are seven of those brown ribbon cables on the opposite side also. Together the 14 cables interconnect gold edge connectors on all the boards inside. There were also several internal interconnect cables between the boards plugged onto long gold pins. One board also has a compact stack of about 8 or 10 smaller boards attached to it, it looked almost like core memory but I don't believe that's what it is since these aren't quite that old. The boards are huge though, the largest I've ever seen. Basically they reach side to side and end to end of the cabinet so maybe 18x30 inches?. I froze my butt off getting the boards pulled out today and each one is mounted to a metal support frame around the edge then the screw heads were soldered over also. I don't have them in the house so I'll post pictures of the boards tomorrow if you want to see them. I also got a variety of pushbuttons, toggle switches, rotary switches, and a bunch of thumbwheel switches with visible gold off of the front panels.

macfixer01


----------



## Geo (Jan 15, 2012)

the sockets and the processors on the readout board is pretty hard to find and bring a decent price (much better than scrap). and another thing to watch for are Nixie's that have symbols other than numerals. especially commas and the colon.


----------



## macfixer01 (Feb 5, 2012)

I happened to find the other pictures I took of the huge boards on my camera tonight. These are the biggest boards I ever got a hold of, they're each 28-1/4 by 16 Inches. I really screwed up though, it turned out the attached module in the middle of the first board was Core Memory. If I had kept it intact I'm sure I could have sold it for good money on Ebay. All I could see on the top board of the stack was diodes though, and the stacked boards were so close together I couldn't see anything inside. Once I pried the first board off I saw the ferrite cores on the next board in. Live and learn!


----------



## resabed01 (Feb 6, 2012)

I could look at pictures like these all day! Good thing doing so is legal....lol
I wish I could score some vintage scrap like this. That stuff looks good! Keep the pictures coming and thanks for posting.
That was the first thing I thought of when I saw your first picture in the last post...... core memory.
To think that whole board to support a core memory that was maybe 128 bits in size.


----------



## Geo (Feb 6, 2012)

i know we speak of some of this stuff being vintage, but actually alot of these components are still used today. i had a large load of electronics from the late 70's-late 80's. mostly test fixtures and i found out that alot of the old test equipment is still in use today. by the nature of the equipment the components are easily replaced so any parts that go bad are just replaced and the piece goes back into service. it takes a major part of the whole to totally disable the entire fixture. theres still alot of this stuff out there.


----------



## Claudie (Feb 7, 2012)

Geo said:


> i know we speak of some of this stuff being vintage, but actually alot of these components are still used today. i had a large load of electronics from the late 70's-late 80's. mostly test fixtures and i found out that alot of the old test equipment is still in use today. by the nature of the equipment the components are easily replaced so any parts that go bad are just replaced and the piece goes back into service. it takes a major part of the whole to totally disable the entire fixture. _*theres still alot of this stuff out there*_.




Hope for the future. :lol:


----------



## MMFJ (Feb 7, 2012)

Geo said:


> i know we speak of some of this stuff being vintage, but actually alot of these components are still used today. i had a large load of electronics from the late 70's-late 80's. mostly test fixtures and i found out that alot of the old test equipment is still in use today. by the nature of the equipment the components are easily replaced so any parts that go bad are just replaced and the piece goes back into service. it takes a major part of the whole to totally disable the entire fixture. theres still alot of this stuff out there.



This is actually the core of our business - 'vintage' equipment (which, to some, is 5+ years old - we sell stuff that is sometimes 30+ years old, but mostly 10-ish). The older stuff works and works, built during a time where quality counted, by people that cared about their work (oh, sounding a bit 'soap boxish'....., but it is how I feel!) We grab it up from various auctions, clean it up, quick-test it and offer it at a very reasonable price. What we can't test and/or find comparable pricing for online, we may try to sell at $X (grab a price from the air and take any reasonable offer!) or put into the scrap pile to be worked as we can for the PMs.

You can also find just 'parts' that are still in use, even though you may want to just put it in your collection bin;



I went to look it up - and found it is still a 'standard' product - worth about $24 each
http://parts.digikey.com/1/parts/483524-ic-true-rms-dc-conv-14-cdip-ad536ajd.html

Of course, I now need to find someone that wants just ONE of them, but, hey, it's more than the gold in that tiny thing! If I can't find a buyer in a few months, it can always go for 'melting' - no need to rush it, though!

I know it is said time and time again on this forum, though some of the new folks would learn well to grab these loads and first see what USE can be of the items, before just tearing them apart for the gold/PM content - even if they think they are just JUNK themselves!


----------

