Quote:
Originally Posted by cbenham
The old sets we love to work on and devote much time to were manufactured on an assembly line, so the faster they were turned out the more money the mfgr. made. I doubt the old sets were assembled, tested and boxed in more than a few hours--may be far less, so there was no love for these sets at the factory, only for the bottom line.
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I think you have to separate the management from the the rest of the team before making such a broad-brush comment about ALL of us production workers. Managers cranked the production numbers as high as the workers could bear sometimes, but there were, and still are people who are proud to put their name on their work. Don't you take pride in your work? When I was a biomedical mfg. tech, I had to get it right, lest someone cash in their chips while being monitored or defibrillated by something I said was okay to ship.
Even some company founders had a customer-comes-first attitude. Find a copy of
A First-Class Job about the life of Frank Murphy (of Murphy Radio in the U.K.) and see why his company's products are so revered among collectors. Not every manager in an expensive suit bowed to stockholder or Wall Street pressure, and tin-plate ladder-climbers often had strong union pushback when their blind ambition made life unbearable for the line workers.
And as far as better parts available, I feel the poly-film-dielectric capacitor was a great replacement for the paper-in-oil caps of the early 20th century. Precise resistors are readily available and cheap nowadays, but the ones available back then usually lasted a long time, and I prefer the look of a shiny A-B or Ohmite to those pale, ugly dog-bones you get off the boat.
And noone has been able to explain on here why I need low-ESR caps when the original versions perform just fine. Just sayin'...