This September, I hope to accomplish a few things:
First, foreground left, is a 1960 Hornyphon Attache 61 radio that I’m repairing for a customer. He brought it over from Germany when he emigrated here in the 1970s, and it’s been in storage ever since. The case is in the background right. This one uses an early copper clad PC board, instead of point to point wiring. These early boards are extremely fragile after 51 years and are known to de-laminate or split traces if you look at them wrong, so my Hakko desoldering tool has come in especially handy so far in allowing me to cleanly remove the components from the board without having to use too much heat or pressure. Without it, I wouldn’t have been willing to accept this for work.
Next up, in the back standing upside down, is a 1953 Hallicrafters 8R40 communication receiver. This middle of the road receiver can receive AM and CW signals from 0.55MHz up thorough 30MHz in 4 bands. It can also tune all of the main amateur radio bands, so I can listen in on stations from around the world with it. I have a 50 foot antenna strung around the corners of my roof, so it should work nicely once I get it sorted. I’m fixing this one for myself, when I get around to it.
Finally, on the far right, is one of a batch of 7 more inoperative LCDs that I recently acquired from Craigslist for free. They have a variety of issues, ranging from cables having come disconnected internally up through a bad resonant transformer on one. This particular one, a 19″ Viewsonic widescreen, has a bad resonant transformer in the switching power supply. I’m debating whether I want to find a replacement, or convert this one to an external power supply and just feed 5V/12V into it. We’ll see. I’ve fixed one already and have five more that I haven’t opened up yet.
This should be a busy month. I’ll be posting a short photo series of the Hornyphon repair as I complete it.
