At 08:19 AM 4/7/05 -0700, you wrote: That's easy enough. Everybody has a gold tab plated in their garage don't they? :-) Joe

Hello Heinz et al - Try Douglas Electronics [www.Douglas.com] for ordering the "DEC-style" handles (ones I received were white) $0.55 USD/handle. ...bottom of page: http://209.35.53.132/hardware/pcbs/breadboards/accessories.html#dechandles Bruce ----- Original Message ----- From: "Heinz Wolter" <h.wolter at sympatico.ca> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Thursday, April 07, 2005 2:37 PM Subject: Re: Must-have PDP-11 ... GOLD PLATING AND SWITCH HANDLES Making card,

From: "Heinz Wolter" <h.wolter at sympatico.ca> No, but the strength of the poured ones is adequate, once they have cured. (When they first come out of the molds, they are still too flexible.) The silicone rubber molds give a pretty good result. The hard problems are getting the color right and the air bubbles out. So far, I haven't been satisfied enough with the results to show them off. (The paddles are functional, but don't look enough like the original equipment.) Price is a good point; I have about $150 into materials for the experiments, now. I recently completed a mold for 14 paddles, so I have a fair shot at making matching sets of paddles, even if I never get the colors to match DEC's. (By making 14 of each color, you'd get enough to do an entire switch panel.) So far, all my work is based on 8/e/f/m/l paddles. (I don't have any PDP-11 paddles to use as masters.) Vince

The molds are not having a problem with bubbles. The resin does tend to trap bubbles. Partly that is because it sets up so darn fast. True; the axle bits can be done by over-sizing the mold indentations for the pins. Then they still trap air, but you just trim off the bubbles (before things get too hardened). I actually like the metal pin axles. They seem more robust. Making little plastic axles is fussy work and it feels like it is propagating a design problem from the originals. Vince

On Thu, 2005-04-07 at 17:02 +0100, Bert Thomas wrote: Could it have been a normal board to which someone took a jig saw, and they somehow worked out how to do the solder lettering themselves? That or it was someone at DEC who got a short batch done with the lettering and did the rest themselves... cheers J.

On Apr 7, 2005 12:02 PM, Bert Thomas <bert at brothom.nl> wrote: I can shed light on this thread... notice the seller mentions "SRC COMPUTER"... actually, it _is_ for a Unibus (as everyone has correctly surmised), but SRC in this case stands for Software Results Corporation, my former employer and manufacturer of COMBOARDs. SRC shipped instructions on how to remove the NPR (Non Processor Request) wire from the backplane with every board, and a dual-height grant card to restore it when the COMBOARD was not in its slot. I was told that we made our grant cards before DEC came out with a grant card that would bridge NPR. When I asked about the part number years ago, the owner said that since the little DEC cards were G727 cards, a big one should be at least a 747, right? The GC is simply 'grant card', giving the full part number GC747. I do not know how many Grantosaurus Rex cards were made, but I suspect it's in the large number of hundreds, possibly over 1,000. After I started at SRC (1984), we only made a newer, less interesting model of grant card that was rectangular, with no plastic handles, but with a rectangular cut-out near the top that one could stick one's fingers through for extraction. I have a brick of those, and a couple of the old Grantosaurus Rex cards; all that is left from fifteen years of making Unibus boards. 99% ended up in customer hands, one at a time. There is a small chance I still have the original pasteups for the board, but I would imagine that manufacturing costs these days would be prohibitive. One thing I wish we'd done when we switched to the boring grant cards is to have put the extra pin(s) at the back plane, and put down traces and jumpers so that the card could be converted to Qbus use _or_ Unibus use. We never did ship our Qbus boards with a pair of grant cards (Unibus models outsold Qbus models 10 to 1), so I didn't get to inherit a stack of Qbus grant cards when the company folded more than ten years ago. So that's the story of the Grantosaurus Rex. One footnote... I can't remember what issue of "The DEC Professional", but I have seen the G.R. depicted in the pages, somewhere near the back, as a piece of humorous art (which it is). -ethan P.S. - to one questor, yes, the red is silkscreened.