Category Archives: Portland

Anything and everything in or to do with Portland!

How we Do!

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Spent today giving the mysterious ‘FF’ cab some love. I was initially working towards converting it to use the Mr Do! board I have but I found out the cabinet actually can’t fit a vertically mounted monitor without the back door smacking into the frame. Horizontal mount worked out, so the Do! Run Run board gets to stay.

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I had to pretty heavily modify the monitor shelf even to fit it horizontally. Looking at the mounting setup again I think the original monitor was mounted in there without a frame, and the chassis was just screwed to the little shelf below where the monitor sits.

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I wanted to keep the Electrohome G07 I was putting in fully intact, so I did a bit of rearranging. The PCB and cage had to come down since with the monitor frame in place there was no longer enough clearance on the side. I’m going to redo the butt splices in the video wiring later, didn’t have any heat shrink tubing on hand to do them properly today.

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Also replaced the crappy one piece sealed buttons that came with the cab with the leaf switches that came in the converted Megatack cab and some less weathered buttons from a parts control panel. Installed some real control panel hold downs too since the holes for the slide latches were all messed up, feels much more solid now.

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The game looks much nicer on a CRT. I’ve got it mostly dialed in but the width coil is broken on the chassis I am using so that adjustment will have to stay where it is.

Find of the Week – 1890s Württemberg Uhrenfabrik clock

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I’m always thrilled to find truly old things at thrift stores. This clock was instantly recognizable as being a true antique when I found it on a shelf with a motley assortment of quartz wall clocks and electric clock-radios at the Goodwill on SE Grand. It was priced at $8, ‘as is’. I greedily snatched it up and took it home, feeling like a thief after I checked out and paid the token price.

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The only writing on the case is a fragment of a label on the back, with some handwriting in pencil. It looks like…

Ba(l|b)(y|g|s)
Shar(p|f)(unk.)(u w/ umlaut|i)(d|2)
June 22, 189(7|9)
E?&(l|b)(unk.)

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On first glance I was worried the movement was incomplete because of all of the vacant screw holes. I think the frame is actually provisioned for a few different variations of the mechanism though, maybe some kind of date display thing because of the ‘window’ in the front plate?

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The movement has a few makers markings. ‘Württemberg Uhrenfabrik’ and a stylized ‘WUS’ logo with the text ‘Bürk’ beneath. Based on similar logos found in Mikrolisk’s [1] database I think this movement was made by Württembergische Uhrenfabrik Bürk Söhne [2].

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Output shaft and the geartrain for setting the clock.

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Backside of the dust cover. Hand formed and soldered modification to make the ‘sealed’ area smaller.

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Also interesting is a bit of text visible on the piece used in modifying the dust cover.

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The hands are two pieces soldered together as well.

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Another dust cover strip on the side removed reveals the rest of the movement.

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The spring was wound absurdly tightly already, I gave it a bit of a crank not knowing this and am probably lucky I didn’t break it. I gave the balance wheel a bit of a shove and it actually started right up… It’s been running for two days now. Kinda want it to stop so I can leave it be and avoid putting any more wear on the parts.

I have a feeling the case is not original, though it’s clearly quite old. Not sure how I’d go about further tracing that aspect of it.

[1]: http://www.mikrolisk.de/show.php?site=280&suchwort=W%C3%BCrttembergische&searchWhere=all#sucheMarker

[2]: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%BCrttembergische_Uhrenfabrik_B%C3%BCrk

On the Street – Model A + Bug Truck

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The sun has people bringing out their fair weather transportation. Here’s a few sightings from the opening days of Spring.

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This Volkswagen Beetle pickup is definitely not a factory job (in fact there doesn’t seem to have ever been a mass produced pickup variant). This conversion is a little bit rough cut but I like that whoever performed it incorporated the rear quarter and fender rather than lopping it all off to allow for a slightly wider cargo area.

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Nicely restored Ford Model A parked outside Bridgeport. Early Fords are relatively common and not a personal favorite of mine, but anything this old being street driven is pretty cool.