Making Room

The weather finally allowed me to finish what I started on Eclipse Day. I made a terrific haul of parts from the Operator in Ft. Worth and I am still dealing with it. Most everything got stuffed whereever I could find a place. Monday I hauled out all the SHP, TSA, and DCC chassis I had to determine what to do with them. I ended up scrapping five digital control centers, a couple SHP amps, and three mechanisms I never took the time to do anything with other than stuff them somewhere.

I was going to watch the eclipse using my welding googles. About noon I gave up trying to find them and went out seeking a pair of eclipse glasses. I got real lucky and scored a pair. Armed with those I continued scrapping the DCC’s. As someone who rebuilds a lot of 70’s Seeburg equipment these are chock full of good serviceable parts I can use to do repairs with. I’d scoot out of the garage now and then to look at the sun and see the progress of the eclipse. It was pretty cool.

I threw away quite a bit of stuff in the name of spring cleaning and made a terrific amount of free space by sorting out the aforementioned stuff. I am going to do my damndest to not fill it up again. I put all the scrapped metal chassis and mechs in the alleyway where it gets picked up by the “metal men” as I call them. Guys who pick up scrap and sell it. All the DCC’s I kept got stacked on a shelf in the shed, the SHP amps I kept went on the second shelf . The TSA amps are now residing under the workbench. There was even room enough to put a couple of the large totes filled with miscellaneous stuff from the Operator underneath too. One of the things I did was put the SMC2 hideaway mechanism back in its cabinet. It was taking up a lot of space under the workbench. That is a chore unto itself considering all that had to be hauled out of the shed to get to the cabinet and then put back. The rainy weather stopped me from doing any “shed work”. But today has been sunny and it was so nice out.

The next step is just as tedious. Putting up all the small parts I scavenged. DCC boards, relays, wire harnesses, regulators, SHP amp boards, output transistors, mute/trip relays, stand-offs, fuse holders, mechanism motors, clutches, tonearm assemblies, trip coils, carriage wheels, detent points, couplers, brake cams, and assorted special screws and E clips. This is from a long habit. When I started out in business I was poor. Anything that got scrapped, pinball, video, or a jukebox got taken down to everything I thought I could so I wouldn’t have to spend money on in the future including nuts and bolts and wire.

Always Something

Always something in my Seeburg world. I have a pair of modified mid 60’s Seeburg DDS-1 speakers in the dining room I use for my stereo system. Two 15 inch bass speakers and a huge Altec Lansing 811 horn. I use a dual 10 band EQ with it to dampen the massive treble from the horn and bring up the mid-range. They sound fabulous. Anyways….I finished another “ship in the bottle” PA-4 Library Unit pre-amp and always use the Library Unit mechanism on top of the right speaker to test them with. I connected the pre-amp. It is a mono pre-amp but I have the inputs to the Kenwood amplifier twinned for output to both speakers. I noticed real quick that the right channel sounded very flat with hardly any output. What now?

My first thought was that the Kenwood amp had a weak channel. Sometimes I overthink things. I hauled the amp and the tuner out to the bench in the garage and spent time making a speaker harness and getting it all connected. Even had the O’ scope up and running. It didn’t take but a few minutes to see that both channels were OK. The last time I repaired this amp must have been 30 years ago. I actually have the schematics for it ordered from Kenwood lo those many years ago. While I was at it with the cover off I sprayed down the controls. They were getting static-y. So, feeling kinda stupid, ’cause all I had to do in the first place was swap speaker leads and see if the problem followed or stayed with the speaker, I put everything back and did just that. Bad right speaker. No horn. I took the back off the right speaker and was quite relieved to see that one of the speaker leads from the crossover network had come off the horn. I re-connected it and tested and all is OK. At least I got an opportunity to dust everything off. I don’t particularly enjoy dusting. It’s just that I don’t like working in a dust cloud.