Vivisection Day 1

My lovely, extra old-school, 1950's-ish, 11 transistor TobiSonic radio is now in the midst of its vivisection operation. After making careful drawings of all its elevations, I finally was able to crack open this crazy thing and take a peek inside. I was shocked, but in a good way.

Inside my new radio was a veritable cornucopia of craziness. Transistors, capacitors, and thingamajiggers everywhere! Not to mention the silica packet and paper insert detailing how to put 4 AA batteries in series in order to create a proper 6 volt power source. The guts of this radio amaze me. It's not even a printed circuit board, it's a breadboard. You can even see small holes that haven't been used up. I'm pretty excited to get even further in there, but for now I'll have to wait.



After I finished being in awe of the craziness contained in our TobiSonic, I decided to take out the antenna and the power supply. The antenna came out fairly easily, and works with a simple gator clip attached to it. It seems like all you need is a piece of metal connected to the base of the antenna stand, because when I had only the gator clip attached, you could wave it around and have a distinct affect of the radio signal. Minutes of fun!

The next step was to fiddle with the power supply. First, I simply elongated the wires that hooked into the 9V battery supply. This worked well enough, so I decided to take apart the AC adapter/headphone jack piece and move that way from the main body.

The AC Adapter has proved to be a bit of a quandry. As it stands right now, the patient is flatlining. When I attach the battery to the power source, nothing in the radio works, but the battery gets extremely hot. It's just a short in the wire somewhere, but it's a fairly complex assembly, and there are 7 wires total going to it, so I have to suss out which one is the sticky wicket tomorrow morning, I suppose. It might not be working right now, but it'll be better tomorrow. It can't get any worse, I suppose.



Anyway, here's a fun picture of the whole things spread apart. Tomorrow I plan on tackling the speaker and tuning aparatuses.