Restoring and old Neve desk - DONE!!!!

[API]

So after making sure that the bucket fits in perfetly place i start to mount all the hardware for the guiderails.
Its kind of important to get the correct spacing and to check the depth of the rails so the modules will fit perfectly to the connector in the bottom of the bucket.

I also drill out the ISEP rails to be able to fasten the thin alu plates that separate and "frames" the different parts of the bucket.

 

[API]

After this is done and i made sure that everything fits perfectly its time to change out the sawed off ISEP rails for the VU panel.
I thought that this was going to be easy but i realized were mounted inbetween the two sidepanels by the patchbay.
So i had no choise than to try to split the console at that point with all the wiring still attached.....
Not an easy job since there are several very hard to reach screws that needs to be removed before you can separate the two parts.

But first i dryfitted the VU meter panel to see that it fits good enough.

Then i clamp the new frontplate to the fram to see that it fits as well.

Then i split the frame to get access to the screws holding the isep rails for the VU panel

Here are the new rails fitted to the frame.
I also had to manufacture and drill out a new top panel.
This panel is important since it gives stability to the VU panel rail and also is the panel where the top wood is attached to.

Then i drill out the frontpanel using the old shorter one as a template.

After that i put it all back together including the bucket and all panels and now finally it starts to look like a console again!

 

[ruffrecords]

That's more like it.

Cheers

Ian

 

[API]

Thanks Ian!

Next up is to start the wiring of all the connectors and to mount those and the connector rails in the new bucket.

I was lucky to find some original rails on Ebay a year back so i did not have to manufacture these.
These were cleaned and numbered as they were in the original bucket.

Then i wire up all the 15 pin Amphenols and mount them in the rails.

And then i do the same with the 18 pin Amphenols for the inputmodules.

Then all the rails are mounted in the bucket, lots of cabling to be wired in!

On the inputmodule rails the B+ and B-  needs to daisychained between each channel and over to the excisting bucket as well!
Something i forgot at first and took me some time later on to realize...

The last thing i do for now is to wire in the Plessey connectors for the P&G faders.
First up is to bundle the balanced cable for in/out with the chassis cable that runs from the bottom mountingscrew of the connector rail (which in turn is connected to the chassis pin of the bottom Amphenol connector).

Then i clean all the connectors and solder all of them in to the wiring.

 

[PRR]

>> Yards, feet and inches were invented in England
> the British that "invented" the inch but that its not longer used there.

English "inch" comes from Latin uncia "1/12". This would be 1/12 of a "foot", which is figuratively the length of the King's foot (or shoe). (The "rod" for land-measure is the total length of the left feet of the first 16 men to come out of the local church, so it was a local measure.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fileetermination_of_the_rute_and_the_feet_in_Frankfurt.png

In many other cultures the near-same measure is the "thumb", thumb-wide, a convenient tool of many uses. French: pouce inch/thumb, Swedish: tum inch, tumme thumb. You cut a board a thumb thick (inch board). You shorten a too long rafter 3 thumbs.

French artillery Inch (old cannons can be measured today) was 2.70cm (1.06 modern inches).

At other time/place, three sound ripe barley-corns taken from the middle of the ear set end-to-end was a legal inch and the base for all other units. This of course does not work, and pretty soon an Official Inch was kept at London.

The Scottish inch was about 1.0016 imperial inches (about 2.5441 cm). This is the unit in "For when I gave you an inch, you tooke an ell". An ell was 37 inches(??), now forgotten, we say he took a mile.

England, Canada, and the US coordinated official "Imperial Yards" (36"). When compared in the 1800s, improved technology showed now-significant difference. As the French were way ahead on all this, and the average of the three Yards/36 was very near 2.54mm, the Inch now (1959!) _IS_ 2.54mm exactly, and we get that from the scratched stick in the cellar in Paris (or the current wave-base definition).

I want to say that Metrification came into English everyday life over several decades. Certainly the WWII blueprints were Inch, or the trouble the US had helping England would have been worse. The English still drink beer in Pints (but not US Pints). UK argued with EU to allow some traditional units in labeling and signs.

 

[ruffrecords]

I want to say that Metrification came into English everyday life over several decades. Certainly the WWII blueprints were Inch, or the trouble the US had helping England would have been worse. The English still drink beer in Pints (but not US Pints). UK argued with EU to allow some traditional units in labeling and signs.

This is true. At primary school we were taught arcane measures like rods, furlongs, pounds and ounces. Even money was different then with 12 pence to the shilling and 20 shillings to the pound. Decimalisation did not occur until the early 70s. When I started A Level Applied Maths in about 1967, questions were still in units of poundals and the like. No sign of SI units like Newtons. In A level Physics it was different, SI units was the standard and it was the same at university. However, I took a thick sandwich course (apprenticeship) which involved one year in industry, 3 at university, followed by one more in industry. My apprenticeship was with British Aerospace and all the mechanical drawings were in imperial. PCBs were certainly imperial and remained so when I reached Neve in 1974 and from then on until well into the 80s by which time mechanics had moved firmly over to metric.

We still resist metrication on a daily basis. We still measure distance in miles and speedometers measure miles per hour and one trader was prosecuted when he refused to stop selling his produce in imperial weights. We still have pints of milk as well as beer and I still ask the butcher for a pound of sausages. This will eventually die out as those of us old enough to remember imperial units gradually fall of the perch.

I have long been puzzled by American gallons which are only 6 pints compared to an imperial gallon which is 8 pints. I always thought everything in America was bigger but clearly it is not.

Cheers

Ian

 

[Gene Pink]

I have long been puzzled by American gallons which are only 6 pints compared to an imperial gallon which is 8 pints. I always thought everything in America was bigger but clearly it is not.

A US gallon is about six of your pints, but eight of ours. Your pint = 20 oz,  ours are 16 oz. And I believe your fluid ounces are slightly bigger, to confound things even more

Gene

 

[PRR]

> questions were still in units of poundals

And BTU? I was flabbergasted when I saw UK heat sold by KW, not BTU. The British Thermal Unit was a key tool to develop Thermodynamics, and all that goes with it. True the "W" is Watt, a good UK guy (Scot). In the US, heat is still sold by the BTU. (But cooling larger than a room is sold by the ton, because that machinery originated in ice-making. And a "1.5 ton" A/C has detailed specs in BTU, because our R insulation math works on BTU.)

> American gallons which are only 6 pints compared to an imperial gallon which is 8 pints.

Uh? Your cookbook is wrong. 8 pints to a gallon.

> I always thought everything in America was bigger but clearly it is not.

How big is it??

England had Corn gallon, Ale gallon, Wine gallon, and one for the Irish. Many different sizes. The present Imperial Gallon, rationalized from the Ale gallon in 1824, is nominally 10 Pounds of water, about 277.42 cubic inches, or apparently 4.54609 litres exact.

The US gallon is 231 cubic inches, now exactly 3.785411784 liters. This seems to be the Queen Anne Wine gallon. Maybe we only brought one bucket over and used it for every liquid?

The ratio 277.42/231 or 4.54../3.78.. is about 1.2. Or a US gallon is 0.83 of a UK gallon. In Canada gasoline/petrol is sold in UK gallons to confuse border crossers. There was a short period in the Gas Crisis, when US gas got over $1/gal, when it was metered by the Liter to delay re-equipping all our gas pump counters. (Drove the attendants nuts converting.)

There are four quarts in a gallon, two pints in a quart and 16 US fluid ounces in a US pint.

The US also had a Dry gallon 268.8ci, but is apparently not used in commerce and not defined in US Code.

Both the US liquid and imperial gallon are divided into four quarts (quarter gallons), which in turn are divided into two pints. These pints are divided into two cups (though the imperial cup is rarely used now), which in turn are divided into two gills (gills are also rarely used). Thus a gallon is equal to four quarts, eight pints, sixteen cups or thirty-two gills. The imperial gill is further divided into five fluid ounces, whereas the US gill is divided into four fluid ounces. Thus an imperial fluid ounce is 1/20 of an imperial pint or 1/160 of an imperial gallon, while a US fluid ounce is 1/16 of a US pint or 1/128 of a US gallon.

The imperial gallon, quart, pint, cup and gill are approximately 20% larger than their US counterparts and are therefore not interchangeable. The imperial fluid ounce, on the other hand, is only 4% smaller than the US fluid ounce and therefore they are often used interchangeably.

Be advised that a Texan's "ten-gallon" hat holds only 3 quarts.

FWIW, we buy bottled soda and water in liter bottles, but we see them as "large quarts". Actually I buy 5-gallon jugs which I assume are Ms. Anne's Wine Gallons. I guess the little bottles are a global thing but the water-cooler jugs may still be US source.

 

[Whoops]

API congratulations on your work.
It's really impressive what you are doing, I will follow this thread with great enthusiasm.

Your workshop and tools are also very nice.
What type of work do you normally do?
you seem nicely setup

Best Regards and please continue the amazing work you are doing

 

[shabtek]

thanks for sharing API, keep us updated--'tis a beauty                                                                                                                                                      and also thanks to PRR for that enlightening excursion... now back to this gill of scotch

 

[Whoops]

I'm not joining the Imperial discussion as I'm from Portugal and I have no idea what "Pint", "Gallons" , "Fahrenheit" and "inches" are!

 

[API]

Thank you PRR and Ian for the history lesson, now i know more than i ever wanted on imperial measures!

And thanks Whoops and Shabtek for the nice words, makes me very happy that you like what i am doing here.
Since you asked Whoops i have a small workshop where i reapir and restore old audiogear as a hobby.
I am also a dealer for mid century design classics, but I used to be a guitartech and tourmanager for bands and also ran my own recording studio.
In the studio i had first one and then a second API2488 which i both fully restored and also alot of other vintage gear that always needed attention.
I have always collected stuff and used to have major collections of both guitargear and studiogear.

So thats how i learned doing this, but i am still learning every day and this Neve project have not been any different.
I have fallen in many pits and had to redo alot to get it right, you only get the "easy" version here  ;D
But its very gratifying doing this work and love it!
In the future i will try to get some of my own ideas into commercial products but i have two more Neve desks to restore first after this one....

Another update coming tonight.

 

[Whoops]

Nice stuff,
It would be a dream come true for me to have the space and setup you have.

I would like 2 questions if you have the time,

You have NTI test equipment to measure frequency response, THD and noise.
I would like to have some setup to do same, so I can measure equipment I build, for repairs and most important for servicing console channels.
What gear on the cheap end could I use for the basics Freq Response, Noise and THD measurements?
NTI gear is great and would fit me well, but it's too expensive for my possibilities at the moment.
Is there anything computer based to do those sort of measurements?

the other question is,
on the DIY 1290 assembly manual, martin explains the procedure to set the Bias on the 1290 circuit.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/EZ1290/assembly6.pdf
Setting bias on the 1272 should be similar.
For people that don't have an Osciloscope Martin gives a rough method of setting the bias on the 1290,
"To roughly set bias in the absence of having proper test equipment, adjust 5K trimpot until TR3 collector (2N3055 casing) measures ~22.66V"
I would like to ask you on the 1272 that you had the Bias calibrated what was roughly the TR3 collector voltages after calibration?

Thank you so much

 

[API]

Dreams can come true, you just need time and persistence!

About the testgear, and other electronic gear, there is one thing i have learned and that is that if pay up once you will have something that will more or less last a lifetime if you take good care of it and you wont have to look back.
It might seem expensive now but you will have to think about for how long you can use it and how much easier your life will be its not realy expensive.

I am sure that there are some computerbased systems as well, and i think it have been discussed here before, but i am not the right guy to answer that question.

About the collector voltage on the BA283 cards i have not measured it when i did these cards, but the next time i have the testgear up i will pop in some cards and measure the collector voltage for you.
I built my own testbox for the BA cards which also have helped me alot and saved me some time.
Either way i think you should invest in a oscilloscope, there are many old analog ones around that could be bought for peanuts.

 

[API]

Ok, back to the restoration.

When they sawed off the bucket they also just cut the bus and powerbars that are running the lenght of the console.
There are four channels at one end for the four busses and five at the other end for Echo 1+2, FB 1+2 and Solo.

This is what the original busbars look like.
They are unique to these early Neve desks and consist of several U and one L channels bolted together and the B+ and two B- bars are solid, square copper bars.

I was very lucky to find some original bars of this kind so they would match the desk perfectly.

I did have to rebuild the busbars though with some new resistors and had to move the posts around a bit to match the exsisting bars.

All done and ready to be mounted in the desk!

 

[PRR]

> from Portugal and I have no idea what ..."inches" are!

Portuguese: polegada inch, polegar thumb

Gallons (not Galows) are 4 Liters, +/- enough to matter.

Best way to size-up a Pint is to go to England and order a beer. A US Pint is smaller but we rarely sell beer that way. Here we had a fussy Weights & Measures inspector who felt cheated and ordered a line drawn on the glass sold as "a pint". So the bars stopped calling them pints, just glasses.

 

[Whoops]

Thanks API for your advices.

It's great that you got the correct busbars, were they from a dismantled Neve console?

 

[Whoops]

Best way to size-up a Pint is to go to England and order a beer.

I promise I will do that

 

[API]

Yes, i got the busbars from Blake Dewitt in the UK.
So very happy that i did not have to manufacture them myself.

By the way, does anyone know where to find those small isolating plastic beads (or know what they are called) that are used in the busbars?

 

[Whoops]

By the way, does anyone know where to find those small isolating plastic beads (or know what they are called) that are used in the busbars?

Can you post pictures of the things?