If I disappear for a little while...

[Spogg]

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Sorry, I thought I was on facebook.

[trogluddite]

Oh no! I'm getting worried, now. Spogg seems to have access to my webcam!

Most of the Office Stores are no more. Everybodies gone 'on-line'.

Indeed! Much as I like cheap online prices, I'd rather pay a few quid more to go somewhere that I can get my hands (or bottom) on something before I commit myself, or talk to an expert with a bit of hand-on knowledge. I was reading something the other day about how something like a quarter of things ordered online get sent back, and showing how much more pollution/CO2 all those little delivery vans are coughing out compared to one big wagon delivering to a bunch of stores.

[MichaelBenjamin]

.

[trogluddite]

...now there are only bullshit stores for clothes and food

My home town is much the same now, too. I hardly ever go there any more, as there is nothing to interest me there. Our last electronic component store was 'Maplin', which closed down a couple of years ago. Online is great if you're ordering for company who wants a million resistors, but it's a PITA and very expensive (delivery cost etc.) if you only want a handful for hobby project.

[Spogg]

For 37 years I worked for Siemens as an X-Ray service engineer, working in hospitals in the Midlands and beyond.

Back in the halcyon days when you could actually repair to component level, if I diagnosed a faulty part, and if I didn’t have one in the car, I was never more than a few miles from an electronics shop. Could be RS, Tandy’s, Maplins or independents. There were also many TV repair shops who would kindly offer components to sell me. Most of the time I could fix a system on the same day as my first visit. Later on in my career, we had to wait for a PCB or whatever to be shipped from Germany and then make a second visit, so patient examinations often had to be postponed.

I guess the issue is that few people are moved to make stuff these days and very few products can now realistically be repaired. In fact stuff is so cheap it’s become disposable. So there’s no business case for running those kinds of shops anymore.

The great thing about FlowStone is that I can now make stuff on-screen, and I never get a soldering iron burn. I love it!

Cheers

Spogg

[trogluddite]

Back in the halcyon days...

That sounds like it was a fascinating career, and I have to say, you made me rather nostalgic. In my twenties, one of my favourite places in the world was an electronics salvage store a stone's throw from Leeds railway station. Besides thousands of bins of components, many of them scavenged, they used to have some incredibly weird and wonderful hardware that they'd picked up from the local BBC studios, telephone exchanges, military surplus etc. I could lose myself for hours in there!

The move towards 'disposable' surface-mount electronics got to be a problem in my last job, too. Our products were mostly teaching aids intended for schools and colleges. We needed chunky old-style components with leads and pins, as we needed circuitry to be big enough that inexperienced students could easily understand where to poke them with oscilloscope probes, and robust enough to withstand the kind of abuse that naughty schoolchildren are apt to inflict upon science kit (besides having once been a naughty schoolboy myself, I was a school lab-technician for a while - so I knew full well how boundlessly imaginitive our young destruction testers could be!)

By the end of my job there, sourcing some of the components that we needed was becoming incredibly difficult and/or expensive, as they were often devices which were once ubiquitous but which no consumer product would ever use these days, such as carbon-granule microphones. A modern 'black box' the size of a fingernail isn't very helpful for teaching first principles, and school science curricula (and many of the teachers!) are notoriously slow to adapt to modern technology.

On the positive side, there's rarely a hardware project these days that I can't solve by pumping some code into a generic microcontroller board, which is handy when you're a better coder than you are an electronics engineer. But, although it's maybe a little masochistic, I kind of miss the soldering iron burns and the reek of flux (I doubt my Mum misses me using the kitchen sink to etch PCBs with Ferric Chloride, though!)

BTW. My shiny new PC is now up and running, so the threat of me losing access to FlowStone for a while has passed. It'll be a little while before everything's set up quite the way I like it, but I'm rather enjoying having a machine that's so much faster than what I had before, and with no gummy letters on the keyboard (yet!).

[DaveyBoy]

a stone's throw from Leeds railway station

I think you must be referring to this place Trog . . .



If my memory serves me correctly it was called M & B Radio, Bishopgate Street.
I think it was a takaway last time I was down that side of town.

I contributed plenty to to the owners retirement fund in my younger days

Happy memories

[trogluddite]

I think you must be referring to this place Trog . .

That's the spot, yes! A fair chunk of my student grant was spent there, and at a couple of the 2nd-hand musical instrument places that were up towards the market (I'd have spent more if I'd realised just what bargains those piles of "obsolete" analogue synths were at the time!)

[Spogg]

...using the kitchen sink to etch PCBs with Ferric Chloride...

Oh nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.

For the first PCBs I etched, I visited our local chemists shop (now called pharmacies for some reason). I persuaded the jolly old guy to sell me some Concentrated Nitric Acid, and he did, once I’d explained the reason (much faster than Ferric Chloride). Now I think about it, I can’t imagine why he had any in the first place, and just what he was thinking allowing a 16 year old boy to play with such a corrosive substance.

But it worked, and the fumes that were emitted were truly wonderful.

Cheers

Spogg

[trogluddite]

^
He he; that reminds me of some of the old "boys-own introduction to science" type books that I had as a lad, complete with lists of "ingredients" that you were supposed to get from the local chemists. We had a few knocking around that were written in the 1920's and 30's, when making your own black powder without any parental supervision was apparently seen as no more of a worry than building your own kite! Bring them back, I say - it seems that the done thing nowadays for young lads who want a bit of excitement in their lives is to drive noisy quad-bikes around like lunatics; they'd be much less annyoying, and probably a lot safer, messing around in a DIY chemistry lab!