Cheap Small Portable Generators

There are many small very cheap 2 cycle portable generators that you can buy. They are sold under several makes and models:
Chicago Electric 66619 from Harbor Freight 800 to 900 watt
Triron 1200
Pulsar PG1202S
PowerPro 56101
TradesPro 836758
ETQ TG1200
Coleman CM04101
And many many more.

Many of these have one thing in common, they are cheap crap/utter turds. They all look pretty much like this:

But these turds can be polished.

If you buy one of the above generators (or one like them), before you start it up I recommend the following:
Replace the spark plug with an Autolite 65, or 64, or an equivalent type spark plug.
Gap the spark plug to between .028 and .031.
Torque the spark plug to 25 foot pounds or 360 inch pounds. The spark plug that comes with them are often cheap junk and not gapped correctly.
Remove the gas tank.
locate every connector that looks like these:

and make sure they are tight, use pliers to pinch them tight if not (the slot end, not the wire end), as they will vibrate off if you do not tighten them.
Inspect the fuel line, if it looks like smooth plastic and possibly has a mold seam, replace it with real fuel line. I would recommend replacing it anyways. Many of these use a plastic fuel line that will swell, split, or deteriorate in a very short time.
replace the fuel line hose clamps with good ones.
remove the fuel valve and replace the gasket pointed to in the picture below with a gasket or washer that holds up to gasoline. The washer installed is plastic and will not last long.

re-assemble the generator, mix up a batch of fuel at 40:1 not 50:1 the extra oil will help with lubrication and should not smoke any more than usual.

Put gas in the tank, wait about 5 minutes for the carburator bowl to fill, and start the engine, with the choke full on, move the choke over to run, and connect a 200 watt load to the generator wait 5 minutes. Using a volt meter check the voltage (under load) it should be 120 volts AC if not adjust the screw in the recess shown in the picture below (the red arrow). If the engine sputters when doing this adjust it as close as you can to 120 volts AC and the engine still runs smooth. let it run for several minutes and monitor the voltage, adjust again if necessary.

The green arrow points to the fuel valve.

Drain the gasoline if the generator will go unused for more than a couple of months. You will have to remove the gas tank and fuel valve to do this. If you do not, the gasoline can turn in to varnish and clog the fuel valve, line, and carburetor. Leave the fuel valve open while it is being stored and the gas cap loose to allow the remaining gasoline to evaporate.

Raleigh Super Sensitivety All Transistor

Got this one off of someone at www.antiqueradios.com. It is made in South Korea and is from the mid 60's. It runs off of 4 D batteries or an external AC adapter.

It did not work when I got it, I opened it up and found that the wires going to the batteries had broke loose. I re-soldered them and it worked. I changed out all the electrolytic capacitors anyways as they were 50+ years old and some may have been leaking. It has a very long almost 7" ferrite antenna and is quite sensitive. I think it may have been manufactured by Gold Star as the general design is very similar to other radios made by them at that time. Probably OEM'd for some other company. I mostly just like the design.

RCA 36X

Picked this up at an Arizona Antique Radio Club swap meet. Many of the radios there were priced a bit high but this one was reasonable and had been completely restored.

 It had one major problem, it didn't pick up anything but static and crackled when the tuning knob was moved.

I found that the plates in the tuning capacitor were either slightly corroded, touching, or had tin whiskers. I carefully cleaned the plates with fine grit sand paper, and now it works perfectly. This is now the oldest radio I own circa 1941.

hallicrafters S-120 Goodwill find

Picked this up recently at Goodwill for very cheap. I cleaned off the hobo sweat. It hummed at power up. I recapped it but it still hummed.

 I did some poking around and found that the floating ground was miss-wired.

It's really just an updated S-38 and performance is about the same.

Harman Kardon hk 680i

Picked this up Thursday at goodwill. Tested it in store and noted the left channel out.

It's a Harman Kardon hk680i.

Top

Bottom

Got it home, opened it up and did a thorough look through. Did not see anything unusual until I looked at the bottom.

Yes those are 2 traces cut with a dremel tool. I jumpered the cuts but that did not make a difference. The left channel stayed just barely audible. Right was normal. removed the jumpers as this could have been a factory mod or maybe something done after market to fix a problem. There was nothing in the service manual about it.

Some research brought me to a thread on Audiokarma regarding the hk690i and that they have problems with dirty switches and pots. Deoxit did not help, but when I took some of the stereo apart I found a broken wire. Re-soldered that and viola it works. HOWEVER in taking it apart I broke the memory presets led circuit board that a previous owner had already broke and "fixed".

Re-soldered that and put it back together but now it has a new problem. It randomly looses lock on station goes to static and the tuner display does random stuff. I will maybe try and figure out whats wrong with it later. Definitely can't sell it as working. It sounds good contrary to some reviews on Audiokarma of it "sounding thin".


I later removed the memory presets LED board and the stereo works just fine but there is no LED indication as to which preset is selected. big deal.

This stereo has some interesting features.
An adjustable FM muting pot on the back, and a stereo separation adjustment labeled "Blend" that goes from Mono to Stereo. Kind weird to see on a stereo from the early eighties. I would expect it on something from the MPX days of the 60's.

Make your own Serial Cable for the Uniden Bearcat BC296D

I recently acquired the scanner listed above, sans serial cable. I sent off a note to Uniden asking for information on the cable and where I might get one.

Their reply (which took a while) was basically (paraphrasing) "we don't carry it anymore, don't bother us".

I attempted to find one on line elsewhere and did succeed but being the cheapskate that I am, I did not want to pay $30+ for one.

No one makes a USB cable that will work with this scanner, it is serial only. There are some that look like they will work, but the scanner connector is for a later model scanner. The cable end that connects to the scanner is not a standard connector. Trust me the standard small usb connectors will NOT fit. Do not attempt to use any regular USB cable to connect the computer to the scanner it will fry the scanner and could brick your computer.

I found a website in Russia that had some vague instruction on how to make the cable, I refined those "instructions".

You will need:
1 - USB Cable for the Fuji FinePix 2300, 2300Z, 2600, 2600Z, or 2500 camera, ebay has them for about $7.50 (including shipping).
1 - 9 pin female serial connector.
The information below.

This is the connector on the scanner (pin numbering marked). The Fuji camera cable connector is in the picture further down.

Cut the large "type A" connector off of the USB cable, solder the 9 pin connector to the USB cable using the picture below as a guide. I would double check the information below as wire colors may not be the same. I used the continuity function on my volt meter to verify everything was correct.

Now for the bad news. The Serial cable may only work with a real serial port, not a USB to Serial. My U232-P9 converter would not work. It would ALMOST work, but the Uniden software is flaky and does not have much in the way of settings. I got mine to work with a laptop I have that has a real serial port.
Uniden software Settings are any one of 4 BAUD rates:
9600
19200
38400
57600 Delay time setting was set to 0.

Configure your port in device manager to the same BAUD rate, 8 data bits, no parity, 1 stop bit, no flow control.

check the Uniden scanner manual on how to configure the scanner with the correct BAUD rate, page 60.

The manual, and software are still available from Uniden to download, and there may be other third party software that can be purchased.

What will become of us?

My wife asked me that the other day, this is what I told her:

Well... eventually we will die, and be buried (maybe). We'll lie in the ground for several hundreds or even thousands of years. A group of archaeologists will dig us up and make wild suppositions on our health, wealth and ancestry.

We will be cataloged and photographed, x-ray'd and DNA sequenced, then placed in storage, where occasionally graduate students will pull us out and make more outlandish conclusions about us. Eventually we will be discarded or lost, until one day billions of years in the future when the sun turns in to a red giant and envelopes the earth our molecules will circulate in the sun until we are blown off in to a planetary nebula.

Our molecules will wander through the galaxy until they are drawn in to the atmosphere of a planet in some other solar system, where biological life forms will ingest and excrete us, until we make it in to a higher life form that says "blorg... What will become of us?"
...
...
...
"WOW! you've really thought this through?" She said.
yes...yes, I have.