Viewer Mail 8½ has Team FranLab coming to the rescue to save the Heathkit clock! Plus some hard-earned desoldering gun tips from yours truly.
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- Music by Fran Blanche -
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Fran on Twitter - https://twitter.com/contourcorsets
Fran's Science Blog - http://www.frantone.com/designwritings/design_writings.html
FranArt Website - http://www.contourcorsets.com
Funny… I just uploaded a video of my own Heathkit GC-1005 clock. Mine has Sperry displays and they still work perfectly.
There’s a decimal point and “keep alive” (another decimal point lower down) for each digit they could have used too.
Thank you for the wonderful nostalgia, something great I associate with my father, who built one of these clocks and would faithfully reset it regularly down to the second by listening to the Greenwich Mean Time station on shortwave. It was fun to watch the seconds, minutes, and hours turn back when digital displays were still relatively rare.
Talking about the value of a dollar, I used to laugh at mom when she was so amazed at what I paid for used cars in the 70's, now when I AM 70, spending 40 bucks on something is still a big deal in my mind. I guess as we age we don't watch the value of a buck that closely.. To support Ukraine I went to a seller on Ebay known to be in Odessa and purchased a used Russian AM/SW radio that is listed as working. The total cost was 40 dollars and I cringed as I poked the pay by Paypal button, then stopped to think of what 40 bucks is compared to the days of my youth.
Glad to see those Panaplexes working. Back then I had a Heathkit calculator with those displays. The design was kinda iffy, with insufficient voltage changes to reliably light up the segments. The manual mentioned that you might have to use it in direct sunlight to get all the segments to light up.
Also, first thing, I noticed that a 1/2 watt resistor in the power supply was getting mighty warm and its yellow color band was turning orange.. I used the calculator against itself, calculating E^2/R for that resistor and sure enough, it was dissipating 1.3 watts! Heath had a bit of a tendency to have at least one mild to severe engineering goof in each device.
At work we have a Pace desoldering pen and it sometimes tend to suffer from clogging as well. Quite successful prevention seems to be to clean all the tube with the cleaner wire every time just before put back into the stand. When just only a bit of the solder there, it uses to be possible to unstick it, but when it becomes completely clogged, the cleaner wire won't help.
When it clogs, the Pace it tends to clog within a thin tube extension protruding into the filter cartridge, so heating that part with a solder when pushing the cleaning wire into the tip usually helps to unclog it.
Shame these are hard to find! that's absolutely gorgeous! be awesome next to a nixie tube clock!
I have this exact clock and it works great! But this particular mod is a really good one and necessary. You could get it close but never exactly on the money.
I had an old nixie tube that had partly lit numbers, it fixed itself after weeks of use so it may take some time to get that segment to work properly._
that ceramic IC has me feelin' some type of way
would you be interested in taking on another GC-1005?
Hi, Fran! I built one of these in the late 1960s. I have had it running continually for 50+ years. Yes! Tube 1 has developed a flicker and your awesome video has given me ideas. Love your work, thanks!
Way back when I bought a used Heathkit H-8 computer with a H-9 Terminal (basically one on their B&W TV tubes with the worst keyboard in the world). I purchased one 8 segment LED to replace the damaged one, burned my thumb but fixed the display, rewired the cassette drive interfaces and booted the computer in Octal then patched the OS using the keypad. Now I didn't really know how to do any of those things (better now) but the manuals with the Heathkit stuff were always top notch.
I'm trying to restore my GC-1005. My problem is in all three displays the lowest horizontal line doesn't glow. Again, this is in all three so its not the display themselves. In addition, the pilot lamp is burnt out. Do you know where I can buy another. Thanks, Phil in Prescott, AZ