One of our regular readers, RHERSH12, sent this to be added to the Comments for the Soldering Tutorial, (our Comments feature is still turned off until we figure out a fix for our Comment spam infestation). I thought it was interesting enough to post in DIY. It had never occurred to me that there might be a decent market for buying failed kits (built, but never worked, and never fixed), fixing, and then reselling them. Some of this vintage equipment fetches big bucks these days.
RHERSH12: I just performed a hack that amazed me by working. I took apart a very complicated JBL pro audio tweeter that was ‘dead’. There was an open lead in about the worst spot. I managed to splice the hair-fine coil wire with a solder joint about .1mm across and IT WORKED! I even took a picture. This is one of a pair of tweeters from 1960 and I just had to try to get it working. I’m temporarily banned from my stand-up day job because of a broken toe. I’ve been spending all of my time at home at my bench working on restoring vintage audio stuff.
One of the pieces I’ve been working on is a kit tube audio amplifier from about 1962. It was built with a couple of tiny soldering faults. The soldering boo-boos completely disabled the operation of the unit and were the dickens to find and fix. It was assembled 99.5% over 45 years ago and never used because it didn’t work. It must have taken 50 hours for the builder to get it to the state it’s in and it never worked! It’s worth a small fortune now because of the scarcity of NOS tube audio. It’s not mine, I’m restoring it for a friend. I’ll eBay it off for him along wit hthe original box, paperwork, spare parts, etc. It will probably go to a collector in China or Korea for a 4 figure sum of money. It’s a strange world.
