The Dinosaur Den 2014 Holiday Special

We're Baaaack! Bil and Fran take a trip into the past to recall their favorite childhood toys, including a look at Heathkits, Spin Welders, Mr. Wizards Experiments in Electronics, the Tandy 150-In-One, and much more!

"Sleigh Ride" performed by Fran Blanche (6-track analog tape recording)

[waew]

Love the old Heathkit stuff.  Here's a link to the video I did on my Dip Meter:
...and, I have the same little transistor checker that Fran had there - that was the first Heathkit that I built.  It can be seen at about 6:22 in my video on testing bipolar transistors:

[fibrodad]

My xmas day is complete. I really enjoy this half chat, half tech show to death. you both come across really well together and seems like you both been friends forever and i would love for this to be at least monthly, I really want weekly lol but i know real life makes it hard to do.

I wish you both a real happy christmas, and on a side note.  I am 46 and as a kid i loved electronics, but information was not as easy to come by instantly and on any subject and i ended up in the Navy ( UK )  now my kids are all grown up nearly, i decided last year to build a basic bench lab, bought all the basics, some kits from a uk kit store and with youtube started my new hobby.  Fixed my broken main tv last week by replacing 2 caps and i was proud as hell.  And my first video i watched was a Fran video, and i have since watched all of them and also the eevblog vids. thank you.

[ociemitchell]

150 in 1 kit. I remember making a loud oscillator with the relay and a very realistic police siren. Thanks for the memories.

[MrEh]

A real blast from the past. Brings back so many memories.
CHEERS 

[Madmax]

Nice episode.  In west Europa we had lots of those kits in the past. Was teaching us how the basic of electronics works, how inductor can make magnetic field for example. Came almost all from Germany.

My first kit was "Den Lille Elektrikern"

[frankbuss]

Nice blast from the past. I had one of these electronics kits as a kid, too. I don't remember the exact type, but it was from Kosmos, a local German company, and looked similar to this one:
They still produce more modern version of such kits. I managed to build the simpler circuits like oscillators, but never managed to build the AM radio receiver, which required to wind your own coil and I probably did it wrong. But then I started programming in assembler on a C64 and forgot all electronics for some time.
And I think I had the C64 Zaxxon version on tape (or was it Scramble?). My father modded the datasette with a small speaker with an amplifier to hear the signal of the audio head, so that I could tune it with the little screw if it was misaligned and didn't load the games. I could hear when the audio head was right aligned and the signal sounded clean :-)

[IncaTrails]

Thanks!  My 150 in 1 Radio Shack Electronicas Kit was one of the things that lead me to a career in engineering

[arthurmann]

Yay!! Fran and Bill are back!! Ah, yes...the good old days. Nearly all of my favorite toys were "made in Japan." Much broken plastic and shards of sharp metal that could cut you if you just looked at them the wrong way! You would scream in agony as your mom poured iodine on you wound, slap a bandaid on it, and then got back to playing with that very same toy. You had a second skin of scabs and wore your Band-Aids like medals of courage. No helmets or pads for you when you rode you bicycle with the dangerous shift lever on the top front bar. If you fell off and got hurt that was too bad. You wobbled back home for repairs maybe even to the hospital for a few stitches if necessary and in a day or two, you were right back on that bike with the numerous scratches. My very first "computer" was a giant plastic bread board-like thingy which had sliding switches, light bulbs hundreds of contacts and tiny wires for you to connect everything into a crude circuit. There were paper cutouts involved which acted as a sort of program for your "computer." You would slide the switches back and forth to make the lights light up in different ways to get answers. The switches acted as crude logic gates. What a contraption it was!! It was a lot of fun learning though. You had to create adventures with your toys unlike many of today's toys that almost play by themselves. I really miss the 70's!!

[oldman]

Cool blast from the past! I had the spin welder, the 150-in-one, Heath kits. Up here in N.H. we had to make them work on are own. I will be watching for more. Thanks

[potterzebra]

Lafayette Electronics sold tube amp kits. As I recall, they were headquartered in Soyosset, Long Island. As an eighteen-year-old in 1960 with no electronic experience, but plenty of practice following instructions building model airplanes, I wired my first tube amp. Three years later, I put together a second Lafayette amp kit for friends. Both amps worked perfectly, first time switched on. It was forty years before I got around to reading about tube circuitry to understand what dumb luck that was. I guess Lafayette's instructions were clear and flawless.

[sidmo]

Best show yet! Keep this up please it is great fun. My first electronics was back in the early 60's when I built a crystal set. By the mid-60s neighbours and friends would give me old TV's which I would dismantle in the basement and try and fix. Mostly I would blow them up, but I remember at one point I had two working, but one only had sound and the other picture so getting them both tuned to the same channel was fun. Luckily we lived in Glasgow, Scotland at the time so only had 3 channels in B&W. I remember gettting shocks off the HT.

[Hauntbots]

Glad to see another Dinosaur Den! Checking in from Gettysburg PA.

[miaknecht]

The show is getting smoother... do more damn shows!! Build something awesome.... modern take on the Big Muff?

[reh]

Thanks For The Heath kit Bought My First Heath kit Scope For $800 (20Mhz Dual Trace ) in1981

[DavidGalloway]

No this was great! My small town had a super old general store with all sorts of left over cool construction and electronics toys from the sixties that no kid ever wanted until I came along. Those lectron blocks are very intriguing. Reminds me of a physical version of the UI of things like Scratch and Graphical design of Shaders in Unreal engine.

[russphilly]

HeathKit GR-81 ! 1967, I built it and still have iT!

[ooNapoo]

very entertaining holiday special, hope there will be many more episodes the next year. Once upon a time I also got the 150 in one, it was sold in the Tandy shops that used to be around in Belgium were I live. Merry Christmas.

[GadgetUK]

Yay!  Glad you are back for another episode!!!

[michaelscherer]

That was a good time. Thanks for posting another video. It was good to see and hear you both.

[YensR]

You are baaaack! :) 
Great to see and hear you!  
Wishing you great holidays :)