Recording, and guitar amps

[TC Chris]

It's winter and time for winter projects. In 1984 and 1985 I recorded summer carillon concerts on the MSU campus in East Lansing. I had a nice Marantz portable cassette recorder, one they sold for commercial service, with Dolby NR and all that. Now 40 years later I am transcribing the cassette recordings onto CD-R discs. The old cassettes sound remarkably good. This is one of those "some day" projects for which the day finally arrived. I figure that the CD-R discs may be more permanent than tape. Some of the brands had problems with binder deterioration. These are playing back just fine now.

Much of the daylight hours were spent freeing up the parking brake cable on the Ranger--all three of the cables are dead now--and fixing the garage door opener that had gone on strike. On the Ranger, I felt some drag while driving yesterday, and when I got home, felt the front rotors and rear drums. Sure enough, the right rear drum was hot. I wiggled and PB-Blasted the cables enough to get the shoes freed up. It is no longer an emergency. I can carry chocks until the shop near my office has time to replace the cables for me. At least the temps got into the 20s today so it wasn't too bad lying on the concrete to fiddle around.

As to guitar amps, we all share the horror of good vintage equipment being scavenged by the guitar amp crowd. But here's a video of a guy taking a free '37 Philco cabinet, carefully repairing and refinishing it, and installing a kit guitar amp in it. He did nice work and preserved the cabinet, while making it useful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGrwAbH25XA

Check out the cool things he didn't have room for at his curbside stop.

Chris Campbell

[William]

That is pretty cool and a great way to save a piece of radio history. I see on of the units that was sitting at the curb for free was an RCA 3 channel cabinet. I a guessing someone robbed the preamp and amp.

Why is it that vehicles always fail when it is 30 below and blowing a blizzard. I remember changing out a radiator in my 1973 Buick LeSabre winter car. I backed it into the garage but had to have the door open, the car just fit in the garage, in order to have room and for better light. That was one cold afternoon and I about froze my fingers of before I got done.

Bill