Spring is finally here!

[Peter Snow]

Hi Gang,

The snow has nearly all melted in Ottawa and it is garbage day today.  Here's my haul acquired while fetching my daughter from sewing lessons (8 minutes drive):

One Lowrey dual manual organ with foot pedals.  Works fine, some keys sticking.  Rickity tick drum machine built in. Only about 8 different sounds - really, really cheesy.  The wood work is particle board with wood grain stick-on plastic "veneer".  A bench too.  Suggestions?

An ancient intercom box with speaker and talk/listen switch.  On opening it up I found it has a circuit board made of clear plastic with holes drilled and the components' leads pushed thu' and soldered on the reverse side - no copper track at all!  The battery obviously leaked at some point and the inside is a white gucky mess.  Should be fun playing with that.

Three VHS machines. I'll break them up for parts (nice motors in there I think)

A fairly beaten up cassete recorder.

An old Philips tube tape recorder. Looks dirty but may clean up OK.

Urei 537 "one-third octave" mono graphic equalizer.  28 sliders - unfortunately about 1/4 of them are broken off.

An all-in-one stereo unit (no speakers).  Arm broken off the turntable but all the electronics seem intact.

OK, OK, most of it is crap, but it is the excitement of finding the stuff that counts.  My daughter is getting really good at spotting electronic stuff at the side of the road on garbage day.  I have taught her well (sigh!).  

My wife is mad as hell!

I LOVE spring!

Peter

[petemoore]

You got lucky!!!

[Travis]

Is that one of the old tube Lowerys?  They're chock full of 6X8's, possibly the most useless (cathode linked) dual triode ever made.  I guess they'd be good as oscillators, but the only other use I've ever seen was Fred Nachbaur's amp.  The other tubes (rect, a few power tubes, and a couple of assorted 12XX7's sound VERY nice)

Something from nothing.  I have dozens of these bad boys, if anyone has any ideas for them, feel free to share.
http://www.dogstar.dantimax.dk/tubestuf/paraph.htm

[Peter Snow]

The lowery organ: I have not opened it up yet, but judging from the weight I would say no, not tubes.
As I see it, I could break it up as follows:

Put pedals and associated circuitry in standalone box similar to Moog Taurus bass pedals.  Maybe add some extra controls to make it more interesting (attack, decay, filter, etc).

Amplifier and speaker - separate out for practice amp.  Add some tone controls.  Maybe the vibrato and chorus circuit could be grafted into the amp.

Split out the drum machine part as a standalone unit.

Big swell pedal could be the basis for a nice wah.

Two keyboards can be used for misc. mono synths that I have been planning for a while now. One of them may be junk - it has two keys with the return springs gone.

Most of the above depends on how much of the stuff is on separate boards - I hope it is not one big mother (of a) board!

A nice spring project - I mean, lasting from this spring to next spring! :?

Peter

[Mark Hammer]

I dunno, Pete.  My guess is that the RCMP have already been through it and taken all the good stuff out.   :wink:

[scratch]

Naw, CSIS beat them to it, better 'intelligence' ...  

[Peter Snow]

Mark,
Weeeelllll, I haven't opened it up yet (later this evening) but I don't see any hoof marks on it anywhere. :lol:

Denis, you are in Ottawa too?  That makes at least 3 of us - we should meet up sometime.

Peter

[scratch]

yep, Mark has suggested a couple of times, and haven't been able to fall into a day that either wasn't car pooling or my wife needed the car  My car pool buddy also tends to change his schedule last minute so it's often a juggle/struggle!... pita living in the country (Vars) with just one car! It'll happen though!