i may have cleaned out the components drawers at 95% off
- March 21st, 2015
- Posted in business of indie music
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Seriously, this Radio Shack selloff is cheaper than stealing at this point – over the last few days, I’ve spent like $70 for easily $800 in supplies at their regular prices, and like $4-500 at reasonable prices.
Varying closing Radio Shacks have varying supplies left, so call around if you want bits. Plus you get hilariously long receipts because they’re ringing up every component package individually.
The longer one is 2.7m long and sixteen dollars.
2 comments on Livejournal, 4 comments on my personal Facebook page’s photo repost.
Also, I had a really nice conversation with an old HAM radio guy, who was at Lake City sorting through all the boxes of bits with me. We talked about things like late-Soviet rock bands building their own instruments and old microphones (because I talked about building my own ribbon mic) and antennas and stuff. It was fun. ^_^
I’ve built two microphones-both carbon. Sound quality leaves a lot to be desired, but they were made from the carbon rods out of old batteries and pencils. A demo thing, and not really practical, though.
I couldn’t play a guitar ( or any musical instrument, for that matter) if my life depended on it, but I did install a pickup coil and build a little two-transistor preamp for someone’s else’s shop project guitar in high school.
Y’know, I have wanted to make a carbon microphone, just to have done it. Did you have directions online or did you figure it out yourself somehow? I went back and looked at old patent diagrammes but they required machine tools I don’t have.
Well, one was thick mechanical-pencil lead in a letter “H” arrangement-the two vertical leads were contacts, and had a groove filed in them for the cross member lead. The two vertical ones were glued to a piece of paper stretched tightly over a wooden frame. Strictly demo use only.
The other was crushed battery carbons (baked in a toaster oven to dry them out) between sheets of brass foil, on a thin piece of wood ( I used a wooden Ping-Pong paddle). The brass sheets are the contacts. Again, mostly as a demo.
These were built, as I recall, from plans out of a United Nations science project book they had in the junior-high school library. I built them around 1974 or so.
Both had very poor audio quality, and were sensitive to vibration. Both were simply wired in series with a 1.5 volt battery and a magnetic headphone from an old telephone. I suppose you could use a matching transformer if you wanted to try it with an amplifier.
Telephone microphones were carbon until the early 1980s. Shouldn’t be too hard to find one.