Hello all,
I bought one of the HP 9825's that Marvin recently posted here about (via VCM
auction). It's a 9825T and seems to work perfectly, along with an HPIB
interface I bought off Ebay. Of course the case needs cleaning and there is a
penny-sized chip from the corner of the bezel, so I've got the whole thing
disassembled, and am now in the process of rebuilding the chipped bezel corner
with JB-weld. Next step is to repaint the case, then replace the at-risk PSU
caps, refurbish the tape drive, clean the keyboard, etc. The unit is
beautifully engineered, by the way.
Some questions for the group:
1) Does anyone have a suggestion for the best paint to match the original
color? If I can find a close match, I'll just tape over the legends on the
bezel, and paint around them. If I can't get a good match, I still may do the
same thing, or I'll just paint the whole thing, and then print out some decals
on a color printer to match the original legends. Or, if anyone here has a
better suggestion, I'd love to hear. Any suggestion for type of paint? I found
a can of Rustoleum brand almond-color satin finish enamel spray-paint. Is that
a good choice, other than wrong color? I also just bought an HP 87 on Ebay as
well, so I'm hoping that whatever I learn here, I can apply to refurbishing the
87 as well.
2) While the unit is completely disassembled, are there any hacks, mods,
upgrades, etc. that I may want to know about before I put everything back
together?
3) I would like to use this in my home lab, so I was hoping to find a way to
store programs without using the tape drive or a disc drive. Is anyone there
moving data between the 9825 and a PC? Can some of the utilities on
hp9845.net
be used to interface with the 9825 as well?
This would be icing on the cake, since it would be shame to let such a nice
machine go unused. However, I do have the Prologix GPIB interface with
PyVISA/Scipy/Numpy,
Thanks for any input,
Dave