What is it? Set 523

Did you ever stop to think it went into the basement, to come up through the floor behind the TV in their living room? For a few dollars more, it came up into the wall, and to a wall plate. Not all TVs were along outside walls. The loss in 300 Ohm cable wasn't that bad. 75 Ohm coax was a lot higher.

J Burns fired this volley in news:l8g86u$vpe$1@dont- email.me:

IF he ran it, and not one of the local "service men". We had a LOT of "tube caddies" back then. Guys who carried a whole suitcase of tubes they bought mail-order, and just swapped new for old until they found (or didn't find) a problem. They couldn't actually _fix_ a TV if one latched onto their ass. Almost none of those guys owned any real instruments, and didn't have a clue that a CRT could often be "rejuvinated" for a period of time.

And, they knew nothing about cable routing, standoffs, or how to use baluns and co-ax (and yes, we had that stuff even in the days of ubiquitous twin-lead).

I owned half of a TV repair business in the 1960s. We fixed a lot of stuff the tube caddies left worse broke than when they found it.

So don't discount that running the twin-lead improperly couldn't have been done with a "professional".

Lloyd

"Michael A. Terrell" fired this volley in news:4b6dnbbKCadBOzbPnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.com:

Higher per foot, yes. But run twin-lead wrong, at it was almost as lossy as a dummy load. When we had a tough run, we'd do baluns on both ends (since no TVs had coax inputs). It was better than routing the 300-ohm stuff in bad places.

And also... yes... there were a lot of folks who didn't want to come in through the eaves. If you could do it well, a basement entry was fine.

Lloyd

It was really difficult on two story or higher houses, and most of the downtown area homes were two or three story over a crawl space or basement. I bought a new Sadelco TV FSM in the '70s to be able to read the levels. What we called, 'Hacks' or 'Butchers' rarely install a lightning arrestor. The few that they did, either weren't grounded or were connected to a gas pipe.

My grandfather did it that way in the 1950s. There came a day when they were better off with rabbit ears.

I followed the same route when I put up a UHF antenna in 1982. Using coax, all I lost was perhaps 0.3db from the extra length. If I'd been using twin lead, I would have come across the attic to save about 14 feet of exposure to outdoor moisture.

In view of recent revelations of Columbia's provincialism, you could be right. I live so far from Columbia that I can't get either WLTX or WIS on my indoor antenna. The last time I went there, my hand was puffed up from experimenting with gunpowder. I had to shake a lot of hands that day.

That was the preferred method where I lived, minus wire nutted splices. Belden made the longest lasting twinlead, and Jersey Specialty Company made the worst. That crap would crack in two years, when exposed to UV light.

I've seen similar wire used in really old radio receivers, (wrapped thread around the conductor) -- and perhaps in the windings of electric bells or buzzers.

And I've seen the same color of wire (but a woven sleeve soaked with wax and slid over tinned copper single-strand wires) used in inter-relay wiring on Automatic Electric "Strowger" switches (part of a dial telephone exchange)

I see that the shaving handle for the Rolls Razor is not actually missing, it was just not photographed in the first set of photos -- or you photoshopped it out for whatever reason. But I see it standing between the hone and the strop plates in the answers section.

As for the first one, I just noticed today that it appears to be a zinc (or pot-metal) casting, so I would not expect it to be particularly strong if it was being used as a fixture for something like cross-drilling the ball.

Maybe for holding it in the beam of an X-ray diffraction system used for studying structures of crystals. (I don't know what kind of material the ball would be --it would have to be something which did not contribute its own diffraction patterns to the photograph.

That looks like a nice wire stripper for some types of wire, at least.

Enjoy, DoN.

If you want to see it a bit sharper, or are curious to read the newspaper articles, replace the "/med_res/" at the end of the URL with "/high_res/" (I first tried "/hi_res/" but that failed. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

What about someone who was *living* in the basement? Is it a furnished basement, or rough? If furnished, perhaps the "entertainment center" was down there, so they aimed for the shortest route to the TV from the antenna.

Enjoy, DoN.

The owner's description of the basement: "neon orange shag carpet, lime wall paint and black trim that was the original basement decor" suggests there could have been a TV down there. He is not in contact with any of the previous owners so it looks like this one has been answered to the fullest extent possible for now.

Rob

"Mike Marlow" fired this volley in news:l8krer$2c9$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

Heh! This discussion started out (on my side), not by saying that running twinlead in through a wall in the basement was wrong (because it can be done correctly), but that in the Columbia greater area, technical skills and craftsmanship are so bad that most any so-called 'professional' TV man in that area would inevitably done it badly.

I lived there for two years while heading up the Y2K hardware remediation program for SCDHEC. It was hard to understand just HOW badly they were willing to do a job, and call it 'right'. We had several senior people quit during the project because they could not accept the standards we imposed; a couple just as soon as they found out the three projects (and three senior managers for: software, hardware, support systems) would be "managed", rather than their just being allowed to 'wing it'.

BTW... we got the job done right and ahead of schedule, but it wasn't for lack of some folks trying to submarine the project. The commissioner had accepted that we'd finish on midnight 12/31/1999, and take the next two months to 'clean up'. We finished the gross remediations in late October, and got it all running up to snuff by 1/1/2000.

Lloyd

Ah, a rec room! Well, nobody would keep a compressor in a rec room!

Grandmother left Columbia in 1916 to escape their corrupted English. That's also why the Puritans came to America in 1620. At the time, the English used their basements for cesspits. When they began living down there, they continued to call them basements. Along came public television, presenting the decayed language of the UK as the model of propriety.

It's a weather thing. If you have frost, the footings need to go down below the frost line, anyway, so a basement is cheap space. Not so much were there is little frost. The exception is hilly terrain. When building on the side of a hill, might just as well build a basement. Simple economics.

In Alabama, we only saw one house with a basement (wife nixed the kitchen on that one). Here, only 79mi away, there are more hills so basements are more common (though still not the norm). I got a basement. ;-)

There are still a lot of slabs here too. But yes the footings must go below the frost line. I think it's valuable space that only costs once. They really don't tax the basements here until you finish them.

I finished mine as it was really cold down here (56) and wanted to give my kid a play area when he was young. He never really used it. So I took it over eventually.

It is valuable space and it costs something like 20% of what above ground space costs. My in laws place was on a slab (E. Central IL) but it was a rarity, there.

The tax deal is pretty typical. ...if you tell them. ;-)

I wanted the basement to myself. ;-) Well, there are only the two of us with 3600ft^2 above ground, so it's not like I have a lot of competition. ;-)

I insulated it last year and plan to sheetrock most of the walls over the next couple of years but I'm not finishing the ceilings or the bathroom. The reason I wanted the basement is for shop space.

I hope you made the decision to insulate with spray foam. There are many advantages over fiberglass. If you are building a shop consider ply walls. My town did not allow that. But the funny thing is you need to use ply to seal the wall every ten feet. But they would not allow ply... they wanted rock.. Bizarre how ply was required to seal the wall, but wasn't fire resistant enough for skinning.... Some code makes little sense.

Nope. Fiberglass. There are many disadvantages to spray foam, too. The primary one being cost. The next three being cost, too. ;-) It's unheated space and it will likely remain unheated as long as I'm there. It doesn't get cold enough, here, that I can't work in a sweatshirt. Summers get hot but it's not usually that bad in the basement. The part underground isn't insulated so tends to regulate the temperature somewhat.

I thought about plywood, after reading some suggestions here, but decided against it for various reasons.

I'm late to the show,and it is the only time I knew 2 of them.This,as I had to buy one once, and 3050.

As for 3050, early radios did not use variable capacitors, everything was done with inductors.

Jeff