RMW Ramblings

  Old Tech The J. C. Whitney Catalog J. C. Whitney was a mail order supplier of automobile parts and supplies.  Their catalogs were full of functional parts, but more, trendy accessories.  They had Packard-style swan hood ornaments, Cadillac-style "V" chrome car emblems, curb scrapers, flip day/night mirrors, "cowboy" steering knobs and such. Here is a page with blue dot tail lights and driver side spotlights.      There was a "competitive" catalog from another Chicago supplier, Warshawsky & Co.  There were emotional partisans of Whitney vs Warshawsky, but they were the same business.  The business was on a wedge-shaped intersection in Chicago,  and the two names used mail addresses on opposite sides of the intersection.   I bought a Bermuda bell ("Ding-dong!) from Whitney  for the Sunbeam Alpine I restored to alert and impress my grandkids and friends when I picked them up at St Ann's school.  I sold the car, but kept the ...

  Old Tech Tube Testers In the pre-flatscreen era, and the pre-solid state electronics era, our TVs were full of a lot of vacuum tubes with limited lifetimes.  When the television misbehaved there was an option for a do-it-yourself repair before you called the service company, the a local store with a tube tester.   Our local 7-11, drugstore, and other shops had self-service tube testers and had an inventory of the more common tubes.  Pep Boys provided a helpful guide to take you to the tubes in your set that were the possible cause of your problem.     Unfold the little guide...     ...and find your problem in the little pictures, then find the "tube group" to match your tubes so you know which tubes to pull and cart off to the tube tester.  And here is one: Some retro HiFi enthusiasts still cling lovingly to their vacuum tube amplifiers.  Since the old vacuum tube TVs aren't compatible with modern TV standards, old television sets don'...