I remember in my high school days (1956) of removing the vibrator in many friends cars, banging it on the curb and putting it back in. This broke the "welded" contacts and restarted the pulsed signal to the transformer primary.
One of my friends watched me do this and when his radio failed, grabbed the big filter capacitor and yanked it out of the chassis. Needless to say I had a lot more work to fix his radio.
Dan Kahn
On Thursday, February 27, 2025 at 12:56:22 AM EST, Andy via groups.io <ai.egrps@...> wrote:
On Wed, Feb 26, 2025 at 07:39 PM, wn4isx wrote:
[And for you with dirty minds....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibrator_(electronic)]
I wondered when you might go there!? :-)
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My only experience with vibrator power was in the automobile's radio which of course used vacuum tubes (late '50's).? We almost never turned it on.? I think the reason was fear that it would fail about every 5 times it was switched on, and nobody likes bringing the car to the service station to fix the darned radio AGAIN.
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At first I thought you were taking this topic in the direction of flashlights.? I remember my dad's big metal flashlight, which had five (yes, five) "D" cells to power one 6 Volt bulb in a big reflector.? Now wait a minute.? That's 7.5 V, powering a 6 V incandescent bulb?? To be sure, the flashlight was very bright.? I think we know why.
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Were incandescent bulbs rated in such a way that you could run them about 25% over-voltage and they happily worked and didn't give up the ghost?? It seems like a great way to make a super bright flashlight but one that went through bulbs faster than it did batteries.? And yet it did not burn out its bulbs.? It makes one wonder.? Maybe it drew so much current from the "D" cells so that their nominal voltage dropped significantly?? I wonder.
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Back to batteries.? My first exposure to NiCads was the HP-35 calculator in about 1972.? All I knew about NiCads was that NASA had experience using them in satellites, which is where they learned about their dreaded? "memory effect".
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Batteries in a Portable World: A Handbook on Rechargeable Batteries for Non-Engineers, Fourth Edition?
Might be worth looking into, even at my age.
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Wow, there are so many new battery technologies - every month or so - that have 1000 times the capacity of last month's invention, so that surely by now they must be capable of powering an entire city for a year on one simple set of rechargeable batteries.? Yeah, right.
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Andy
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