devices of unecessary complexity

Kudos.

That's cool. I envy your vast knowledge/experience base. (I only made it to half vast.) Had I wanted to go to college, I likely would have taken both electrical and mechanical engineering courses. My parents offered to pay the price. But I was too fed up with people, being a hermit by nature. I chose auto mechanic tech school over college, as machines don't talk back.

It's still stupid design if nobody though ahead at all.

A F is not rare or valuable, no matter what you tell yourself, they churned out trillions of the things. Check prices on keh.com

not true.

Walker?

(Sorry, first thought. Can you tell I'm a sci-fi fan?)

Yeah, first thoughts always run along the lines of your most utilized base of knowledge. Deeper thought runs out and finds more isolated and less frequently used pools of knowledge.

That was really cool of that company, Jim. I doubt it would happen at

99% of places nowadays.

Statics or statistics? I had all the tech classes in early school, too. Metal and wood shops, basic aviation, HS organic chemistry, mech dwg.

Reality sets in once you do get onto a machine. Theory and paperwork only get you so far. Then it takes a bit of time converting those old synapses from concept into manual dexterity. It can be shocking, but it's fun, most of the time, right? All knowledge is good.

Great. I finally got back on my little HF (Harbor Freight, not high freq) TIG yesterday and once again repaired the steel mount bracket for Dad's old Craftsman circular saw. I hadn't penetrated well enough the first time and it only lasted two months of very light work. This time, I turned the amperage down and spent some time pooling the area so I got a good, deep puddle. What I didn't burn through the first time looks, um, fairly good now. (no picture requests, please ;) Anyway, the more metalworking, plasma cutting, and TIG welding I do, the more I like it.

I wonder what kind of solar/battery setup I'll need to continue to use that thing once the grid goes down... Time to start looking at 240v inverters, I guess.

I didn't stay in the field long enough to get that kind of experience.

Sad, isn't it?

My year at Coleman College's Computer Electronics Technology course taught me troubleshooting down to the component level, too. I stayed at it for only 3 years as a test tech before SKF bought out Palomar Technology (vibration datalogging/pre-failure maintenance) and I changed to a computer repair/software guy swapping boards in mainstream personal computers. I've lost, from disuse, most of what I learned at Coleman in 1986-7.

A friend just retired from the appliance repair field. He was a natural at troubleshooting beyond the board, but most of his work was board replacement until they learned that he could do more. He ended up getting all the "bad" jobs, where board-replacers couldn't fix the appliance.

Lots of these folks are either getting out of the business or dying from old age, so what comes next, when all of the true knowledge is gone? How far away are we from the coming global Idiocracy?

I probably have only 10% of the learning of some of you folks here, but most of what I have is practical knowledge. I have a feeling that I'll need all of that (and a whole lot more) in the coming years, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I have curiousity to burn. Before it (the lens) goes back for some sort of cam calibration, I wanted to see what was inside. After putting it back together, it seems to line up correctly at infinity again, matching the other lenses that do in fact work correctly woth the same body. It appears the grease is separating into oil though, or they're really heavy handed with "oil barriers" to prevent water from getting sucked into parts. Some of the paint on the light baffles is coming off, which is just silly, so the thing may just go back anyways.

Never taken one of those apart. I have fixed Crown Graphic cameras with the top rangefinder and light beams. Unlike everything foreign, they're simple, easy to fix and don't require gadgety tools to work on. It looks like you need 7 types of spanner wrenches or "split screwdrivers" to properly take apart an F. Not sure why they stopped at that and didn't got for 27 or 39 different types. Why anybody would even want to make, warehouse and then install at least a thousand parts into a camera while adding as many parts as possible for even mundane use.

A comparison on the self timers on the F vs some sort of Sears branded

1970s Mamiya shows the F has at least twice as many parts. All it is is a geartrain with a spring and escapement that takes about 10 seconds to hit ero at which point a cam moves something and fires the trigger release. They're actually quite similar is size and construction otherwise, so it's apparent half the Nikon parts simply aren't needed.

I wouldn't mind.

That's about 33 times more than an F with no prism.

Rangefinder mechanisms can be super complex, although it's not necessary at all. Does the S have different sight lines and parallax correction?

Larry Jaques on Mon, 22 Sep 2014

19:08:42 -0700 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

No, it is part of the "Engineer Rap" from a dozen years ago.

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."

"Jim Wilkins" on Mon, 22 Sep 2014 12:35:05

-0400 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

Learned enough to know when they were attempting to blow smoke ..

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."

Gunner Asch on Mon, 22 Sep 2014 18:16:02 -0700 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

It came to me that there might be another explanation. Because when I was a kid, the return lever on my dad's typewriter broke, and parts were no longer available. Not even from the factory (we checked). So one afternoon, I being bored, took it apart. Disassembled it pretty completely. Saw no reason to keep the cast iron frame, so broke that up. It wasn't until decades later, that I realized "there probably was a metal shop in the High School, an new part could have been made. Even with 1970 technology." Sigh. So soon old, so late schmart.

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."

"Lloyd E. Sponenburgh" on Mon, 22 Sep

2014 11:59:38 -0500 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

Yep.

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."

Gunner Asch on Mon, 22 Sep 2014 17:56:43 -0700 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

The real problem is finding some place where the film can be developed, and prints made.

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."

Pentaprisms can be found -- or waist level finders -- or sports finders -- or ...

To make the camera manufacturable. A lot of those parts are for tuning the speeds and motions to allow for variations in spring constants and the like. The cheaper cameras have fewer parts, and less accuracy as a result -- especially as they age.

Of course, today a lot of that is tuned using microprocessor chips built into the camera. :-)

Thank you! I've now downloaded manuals for all the Nikon SLR cameras I have. (Do you know of a similar site for the Zeiss Contax?)

Thanks, DoN.

Larry Jaques on Mon, 22 Sep 2014

19:32:34 -0700 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

Ah, more like

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."

Larry Jaques on Mon, 22 Sep 2014

19:50:54 -0700 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

The is rec.crafts.metalworking - you should be planning on the steam powered generator setup! From Scratch! Refine your own scratch, too!

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."

As far as enlargers go, I like the Omega Pro Lab, 5 or 6 series, since they're all pretty much the same. They are machines of truly great design. They are sturdy, reliable, use simple parts and are easy to adjust and repair. There are no bullshit extra parts. All the parts that wear out can be replaced with stuff from any hardware store with a good selection of parts bin.

The opposite of Omega would be something like Durst. Every part is specialized or complex because they came out of a socialist country with machinists nobody could fire. THe minute a product has dozens of types of fasteners, you know the rest of the product is going to be just as stupid.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Motorola had some truly innovative engineers who made some fairly incredible products, like their handheld radio line. I recall some of the Radius series had no screws at all, were easy to assemble and just as easy to take apart. They were also completely weather sealed, which was made even easier as they didn't have any screws to start with. Yes, they were super tough too. Simple is good, and they really ran with this concept for a while.

Sure they do. You can even carry on conversations with some of them. I told more than one piece of equipment that if it didn't behave I would scrap it for parts. :)

Some are 32 bit, some 64, but there are too many two bit brains out there. ;-)

Tektronix figured it out in the '50s & '60s. Slide an item out, lift and remove for service. Or lock the rails and rotate the chassis to service it in place.

It was a real joy to be able to connect to a piece of equipment from the front of a rack, then slide it into place.