Dusting off the PA since it's going to see some use this fall, and I'd really like to dodge the last minute cram if at all possible.

While I was tooling about that corner of the garage I figured I'd give the pile of dead speakers a more thorough examination so I can start chewing on my plan for them as well. Enter a Cerwin Vega 154FM that was beaten into submission at Eugene Noise Fest 2007. If I had to wager a guess, I would say it was during The Sunken.

Which led me to this observation. Furthermore, clamping a battery lead onto that little sliver of wire confirmed that everything else was intact and functioned as normal.

Upon removal of the dustcap, which is a two layer fabric mesh over aluminum assembly, I was greeted with less than optimal news. Judging from the concentric creases, it would appear as if the tinsel fell out to prevent the voice coil from punching through the cone.

The eyelets that tie the tinsel to the voice coil wires are on the verge of punching through as well, observe the discoloration of the VC lead terminating into the empty eyelet, that'll be explained in a moment.

Due to the weakened cone structure, the voice coil assembly and immediate surrounding area could close up to the aluminum dustcap when the speaker was in it's positive excursion. This effectively shorted the output of the amplifier across the dustcap, producing the spalling seen here and heating the joint up enough to cause the solder to flow, whereupon that connection acted as a fuse and opened up eliminating further damage.

Repairing the electrical connection was easy. Reinforcing the integrity of the cone to avoid repeating the failure, however, resulted in the plastic surgery disaster seen here.

I'm not ashamed of this, it is ugly and I would not endeavour to recreate this, but honestly this driver has been sitting around awaiting a recone for 5 years, and if this botch-work quilt of a fix extends the use of an otherwise trashed object, I'm all for it. I realize that with the pooled glue splints the delicate nuances of whispering sweet lower mids have been pounded into the bog, but since this is a piston being deployed in the 40 to 100 hertz range that wouldn't have come up anyway.

I replaced the obviously failed capacitor that I spoke of in this previous post, added a 2 amp fuse which had gone missing at some point in the annals of history, and then applied power to the Kloss VideoBeam 3000.

Delightful!

The closed door was the nearest thing I had to a flat white surface handy, clearly the positioning is out of whack. Given the results here, I'm not overly concerned with proper installation, as I do like the deep explosion of colors reaped through placement outside the range of focus and alignment.

Reminds me of the Martians in the 1953 version of The War of the Worlds, a fine collection of stills to be found here: http://www.cloudster.com/Sets&Vehicles/WarOfTheWorlds/MartianWarMachineSht3.htm

Building a rotating cradle to allow on point unrestricted tilting of my video camera for deployment in video feedback.

This is the build up to this point, camera is mounted within an aluminium drum riding on rollers. I understand the drum is an out of spec helicopter part that I salvaged from a scrap bin, the rollers are from an old color photograph processing machine with One Drop yo-yo parts elevating the drum (and all the non-round elements) clear of interference.

I should have taken a picture of this prior to modification, it'll have to wait until I grab another one (I believe there are three of these: developer, stop & fix) to photograph.

My initial visualization of the mounting of the camera was a lot more elaborate than this, which amounts to a 1/4" 20 tpi screw through a shaped woodblock into the tripod mount of the camera. I've still got to remove some material from the woodblock as it places the camera just a touch high of center.

This was a problem at first. I had initially been designing around the solid roller support depicted in the baseplate picture above. My plan was to countersink the hardware into the sidewall of the drum, but while the drum is indeed quite thick (roughly 1/4") there would not be nearly enough material remaining to carry the weight of the camera.

Furthermore, each solid roller rode on a couple rubber rollers that tilted outward due to limiting myself to precast positions in the plastic end plates (that is to say, the outermost roller is lower than the inner). This resulted in the solid roller wanting to walk off the supports when the drum was rotating toward it.

I installed the shrouds on each side to eliminate the walk off problem, but the solid rollers would still shift, which resulted in the entire assembly moving off center as well running contrary to the entire point of building a centered rotating mount in the first place.

So I had a two tier puzzle that needed resolving: A) I needed a gap that will allow the button head of the hardware to pass the rollers without being a disruptive speed bump, and B) I needed a simple and unrestrictive method to fix the larger bearing rollers in place.

Both puzzles were solved by ousting the heavy solid bar, and wiring up One Drop yo-yos to the structural bar below the rollers.

Plenty of gap to allow that screw head to pass.

I still need to reduce the size of the wooden shim, but it's close enough to center to work as is at a live video show this coming Friday. Extended plan includes motorizing the drum and incorporating CV response to the motor driver.

I mentioned previously that the Panasonic WJ 545P special effects generator does not supply the necessary power to run the WV-3250 camera through the 10 pin connector. I had, at the time, shrugged this off as the external power supply works just fine.

What I didn't factor in was the element of sync, which happens to be quite crucial for legible video. As it stands, it would appear as if the WJ 545P cannot lock to a composite video signal at the PL-259 input (my abilities as an operator may be at fault here). At any rate, having the option to power the camera at the SEG is enticing, whether or not this will sort out my sync issues remains to be seen.

I believe I've already taken pictures of drilling metal, so let's just skip to the result. +12 volts at roughly 500 mA is fed at pin 10 (pictured with the blue wire sans heat shrink), referenced at pin 9 (behind the blue wire). Naturally the surrounding pins are to be left alone.

Not a whole lot of room to work here.

Here's the result. Some liquid electrical tape that was used to insulate the ends of the disconnected wires, since I have misplaced my heat shrink. The idea was that the end result would be cleaner than electrical tape which can unfurl over time. I wouldn't call this cleaner, so I'll just comfort myself on the permanence aspect.

A bit of heat & melt due to space constraints, could have been worse.

So there you have it, DC power input for camera channel 1. Since the SEG supports only two channels simultaneously I didn't see the point in modifying more than one input, as I have multiple SEGs that will cascade into one another (forming a loop if I choose) and the power supplies I have earmarked won't support more than a single camera. I'll just allocate channel 1 as a powered input for each.

Let's take a quick peek at another vintage monster in the to-do pile.

About a month ago I ran an eBay search on Panasonic WJ 545P and got a low starting price hit, I then had a peek at the sellers other listings and saw this.

As it would turn out, no one else saw fit to have a go at anything I bid on that day.

So in my recent fit of video allocation, I have essentially ignored the protests of that part of my brain that deals with the logistics of spatial order and have migrated from a critical mass NO BUY frame of mind to a "Holy shit! Cool stuff!!" free for all buying marathon.

I do believe this (as in, the growing video pile, not just this particular device) will force my hand at culling the herd a little bit.

BNC interface, with a hinge..

Guts!

The rear access guts only go so deep. I'd love a shot of the gear reduced wipe controls, but until I actually start digging into this with repair on my mind I'm going to limit the exploration to easy access.

More guts topside. Circa 1977, this is always what I sort of expected to see when cracking open video gear, but to date the majority of circuitry I've seen has been discrete.

Power up carried both good and bad news. It powered up... Also, running the wipe varied indicator light intensity of each input block in relation to position of handle, indicating proper function of that branch.

However, the preview & program output channel selectors (lit at lower left) were unresponsive, and the program bus appears spread out across four channels. Granted, I'm only going on lamp indicators and not observed signal path.

The wide range of video signal types, available simultaneously (I'll get to that device soon enough) coupled with simple tricks such as this truly make video a fascinating format.

I have been remiss in updates, and there is oh so much to talk about, but for the moment I'm going to just fast forward over all the other stuff to yesterday.

When a yard sale just up the street sold me this 70 pound, 300 lumen CRT projector hailing from 1987. I present the Kloss VideoBeam 3000! Yes, that is a standard width doorway in the background.

29 Kv according to this fine brochure which is worth looking at for pictures alone.

Input block is impressive, and I am elated at the RGB plus sync block, as this thing (if it works) will see permanent studio installation for video manipulation (it's probably too underpowered and heavy to serve any other purpose).

Input block is built on a mother/daughter board type configuration. Everything large enough that circuitry work isn't some mind numbing prospect.

I only pulled one card, and this is what I saw..

Fixed it! Hahahaha, I had toyed with the idea of firing this thing up once the cobwebs and mouse shit were removed from the innards, but now I feel compelled to pull all boards and spot check obvious failures before doing anything rash.

Plus, the longer it's opened the less pronounced the lingering smell of cat piss will be.

PS: http://www.remove-cat-urine.com/cat-urine-article-directory.html

Greater than five weeks since I updated last, how time flies. While it would be fun to say I've been busy working stuff up under a shroud of secrecy, that simply is not the case. I won't go into details, but one facet of my last month involved a torrential downpour on a fresh coat of car paint.

etc.

Recently I've revived my interest in the video format. I think looking at the Datatek is partly to blame. That unit powers up fine, but there's a disconnect in switching so that each module is locked into bypass. I haven't dug into it further, so the list of speculated causes is still pretty long (and by no means exhaustive I'm sure).

Anyway, on to stuff that works.

The Vidicraft Detailer II. Composite video tools took a heavy value hit with S-video, and later YP_BP_R formats, and of course, have been rendered essentially obsolete with digital HD video, which is probably why I'm warming up to them now.

Nothing super fancy here, the controls are pretty well labelled, it would seem VNX is a video noise filter.

The three inputs are switch selectable, the fours sets of outputs appear to be distribution amplifier style (to be fair, I haven't tested this, only feeding one screen at a time).

In reading up on the Sandin IP plans, I was hoping to see some cool ICs in here (I hope to see some cool unobtanium ICs in every video device I look at) but honestly I'm also delighted to see discrete circuitry at work.

Audio output is clearly chained, I think the video connectors are loaded with 75 ohms but otherwise fed from the same source.

2N3904 & 2N3906!

There's less than a dollar's worth of actives in this thing, always reassuring. I also favor electronics assemblies that were manufactured within my region, echoes of a smarter time.

My paternal grandmother had an affection for rusty things.

I took a few minutes this afternoon to take a few shots of some tools, I think for the most part the pictures speak for themselves.

Lowellville offset handle. For what?

I don't know. I do know that the inscription is not reversed or otherwise altered in this shot.

Now that I think of it, I could do with some Popeye forearms.

A fixed diff won't do here.

I can see why Jack Johnson invented a better wrench, though this would double as a hammer.

Now we're talking. I have a feeling this will see continued use.

Pincer.

Early go at a locking plier (ala Vice Grips)?

I'm seeing hot metal, but I'm not liking the outcome.

Early example of a self adjusting wrench, I'm imagining chewed up nuts.

These predate stainless steel, so you can't get them wet.

Even after years of neglect, I'd be proud to use these on stuff.

Freshen your drink, gov'ner?

I stuck the 8" wrench there for scale. I think I weigh roughly 175 pounds, and I'm not heavy enough to throw those springs, so...

I'd recommend having this on hand in case you get caught. This has seen recent use, as evidenced by the buffed rust along the blade. I used it to finish out some inside angled cuts roughed in with a circular saw.

Draw knife! When a straight razor isn't "man enough".

You can keep your brass knuckles, I'll be fine, thanks. (This is sharp, the picture doesn't do it justice)

That wood crate is about to be owned.

Given the shape of the tip, I wonder about the obvious use this saw.

A little wear and tear is all.

This is actually one of my regular hammers, it was just nearby and fit the theme. That's a hide handle.

Poker.

Philips head or any of those other new fangled dee-signs can take a hike!

Handy dandy screw starter.

This was obviously a useful tool at some point, now it's just a shank.

Hand forged hoop & hook. I've a more impressive hook in the studio, but that will have to wait until the next round.