Brian Gaff <
brian1gaff@gmail.com> wrote:
[...]
I remember when I was young my Grandma had a wireless and the dial had cool sounding stations on it like Hilversham and Athlone and of course light programme and Home Service etc.
Not terribly accurate dials, but then there presumably had not been much about when it was made.
By the1950s, the wavebands were horribly congested and after dark the
medium wave band became almost unusable except for a few local stations.
The sparsity of dial markings was because most users only listened to a
couple of stations, by then the thrill of hearing foreign broadcasts was
long gone.
[...]
These came marked with different names, but this one said Bush on it. I also saw some with shop names over the years like Ketts. I imaging it was that eras version of badge engineering.
In general Bush didn't go in for much badge engineering but perhaps
local dealers put their names on Bush products (Bush was part of Gaumont-British and had a factory at Shepherds Bush - hence the name.)
It was the same with Reel to reel tape machines. The same two valve pcb and bsr deck was in most of them ...
This was usually a BSR TD2 deck, a very clever piece of economical
engineering. The later TD10, a three-speed deck, was streets ahead of
the more expensive decks in reliability and performance. BSR had a
reputation for making 'cheap' products, but they were so well designed
that they could be made with low precision equiment and still work
amazingly well.
They never wore out because the designs were so tolerant of
manufacturing inaccuracies in the first place. In their auto-changers,
Garrard would use small precision-ground cams and accurate bearings for
the followers, BSR used a huge die-casting for the cam and a bent steel stamping, pivoting loosely on a pillar, as the follower arm. When new,
the Garrard was beautifully precise in its operation - but after 5
years, when it was slightly worn it would need fine adjustment or be too
far out of tolerance to function. The BSR rattled when new and 20 years
later it would still rattle just the same - and it would still be
working.
... All eventually needed the record play switch replacing as they
carbonised with the result that the machine would suddenly go into erase mode as the carbonised bit conducted. Yes the same part of the circuit doubles as a playback amp and an erase and bias oscillator.
The 'Lane' tape deck was a horror for that. The power resistors for
balancing the torques on the spool motors were hung directly off the
paxolin wafers of the Forward-Play-Rewind switch. With the sparks from switching unsuppressed inductive loads and the heat from the resistors,
the wafers soon tracked over. The brakes were paxolin wedges and when
they became worn the 'servo' acttion turned into a solid jamming action
which stopped the trailing spool dead and 'bootlaced' the tape before
snapping it. (Brennell used the same system and had the same problem.)
Their later product, badged as 'Verdik" was a big improvement and was
even considered for use by the BBC and EMI.
--
~ Liz Tuddenham ~
(Remove the ".invalid"s and add ".co.uk" to reply)
www.poppyrecords.co.uk
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