I parted out a BC Rich Outlaw years ago and have had these revolver knobs sitting in a parts drawer ever since. A couple or Dirty Harry flicks were on the other day and it finally hit me what to do with those knobs 😁
Has anyone tried one of these? If so, would you recommend it? I've already got one of those cheapo blue things that you see everywhere as well as one of those Beyond FX ones with the sponge plate that clamps down on top of the board before you flip it - but both of those have aspects that leave a bit to be desired.
I was buying some stupid stuff on Aliexpress a long while back - probably a year ago or so and saw this multimeter for 2 or 3 bucks and just had to get one for the hell of it just to see if the thing even worked. It appeared to have a continuity mode so figured at least it could be useful for that but mostly wanted to see what the deal was with that NPN and PNP socket section and the hFE function I could see on the dial. Well, when I got it, it was a pretty big letdown - the continuity mode totally sucked (huge lag before the beep) and the NPN and PNP "receptacles" had nothing behind them (you could tell when inserting a transistor you were touching nothing but air). Fast forward to today and I'm going through some stuff and throwing out some things that aren't worth having around, and I come across this again, which is a prime candidate for the garbage can and I think - I wonder if there's anything on the board inside this thing for those transistor sockets on the case? Crack it open and sure enough there are pads there. I stick an NPN transistor in - nothing. Then I put that NPN transistor in the PNP row and boom - there's the hFE. Then I put a PNP in the NPN row and yep - it actually works, just has PNP and NPN rows reversed - and there was no way to even use it until I ripped a hole in the front and soldered some SIP scockets to those pads. I double checked the hFE values for a few against readings from my Atlas DCA55 and they were actually pretty close. I even tried other pinouts and it worked for those too. What a goofy thing 🤣
I got this pretty much for free (Guitar Center rewards points) so no huge deal to me but it definitely isn't great so was thinking about reusing the enclosure... but taking off the lettering probably means taking off the paint (or painting over the whole thing) - not sure if it's really worth the pain in the butt or if I should just throw it on FB Marketplace and get 30-40 bucks and be done with it. It does happen that I am currently working on a little Tonebender Mk II based project right now that will have a mini toggle, so there is that 😁
Pulled this old capacitor out of an ancient Allen Wales adding machine that's probably I'm guessing around 70-80 years old. Might look cool in a crazy turret board build or something 😁
I do already have a DCA55 but for 30 bucks I just couldn't pass this up.