Yes we made a lot of those transformers at Chessington. The stuff they used
to encapsulate them ponged so they did it overnight but even with lots of ventilation you could still smell it
Chessington had two fires, one when I was still at school and one in the
middle of the night where you could hear the explosions. As my Father worked there, I got to see the damage both times. What a mess, everything was
soaked in a muddy mess of soot and water, and all the walls alongside the building which burned were buckled and had to be rebuilt very carefully. The site is a housing estate today. The locals got fed up with a fire every
couple of years and noise from construction of new buildings and being overlooked by a lab building, that eventually they moved it all up north and made us all redundant. Might have had a lot to do with the owners British Electric Traction, flogging the whole lot off to Granada of course, who also had another factory, so did not need the one down south. They also had a
sight overlooking Eastbourne with a huge aerial mast to get London and
Southern itv and all the radio you wanted, but most of the cable at that
time was only carrying the RF, the audio was switched from a series of 100v lines apparently. eventually it was all integrated so aerial sets could use
it as well as the older wired ones which had an actual connection to the
cable.
We also did coin in the slot tvs which for a while were used in hotels. Basically an ordinary tv with a coin box on the side !
Going back to the third harmonic stuff, the early eht units used a valve to rectify the eht directly, but the transformers did break down a lot, so they designed on with a different transformer and a solid state trippler. To me
the b/w picture was prone to ballooning and defocusing on those, but as the sets were AC coupled in the video, there were never any black blacks and
bright whites. I put a dc restorer on one once, and we had to put in one of
the old eht transformers or it kind of gave up on dynamic pictures that had bright flashing lights or the sun in them.
I hate to think what else was being overcooked by doing this, but valves
were more forgiving than Transistors at the time.
Brian
--
--:
This newsgroup posting comes to you directly from...
The Sofa of Brian Gaff...
briang1@blueyonder.co.uk
Blind user, so no pictures please
Note this Signature is meaningless.!
<
steve1001908@outlook.com> wrote in message news:
fur6eiponoj6kglr25qnocttc29gjcvbt9@4ax.com...
On Mon, 21 Aug 2023 10:59:49 +0100, "Brian Gaff"
<brian1gaff@gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, I worked in the Chessington Factory and regional repair departments.
Most of our staff were bussed in from Brixton. Mostly ladies and black of >>course. Trouble only started when we got some Kenyan Asians in who seemed >>to
think they were better than everyone else. Arrogant, sadly.
Brian
I remember some chap from Chessington who came to see us northern
simple folk. He asked me some technical questions and I got the
impression that he didn't know the answers. He didn't know what third harmonic tuning was so I told him. I had just done it at Oldham tech
college. Something to do with EHT production I think! It was 60 years
ago so it isn't my clearest memory.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)