[Tubejunke]

Good point about the parts being hard to get, even for a popular type. I recently had to part out a beautiful 58 Zenith Space Command. Up to a point I would have never sold a single part from this set. It just seems wrong as a sort of collector of such things to destroy or dismantle something that regardless of popularity frankly is just very old and not easy to find. However, I couldn't sell the set as for the most part people don't want to bother with the cost and risks involved in shipping. So, I was put in the situation with the hope that somebody will want the easier to ship parts. Most particularly the remote control related stuff.

So I guess this works both ways, but I still think that you will be able to find a Predicta fly if needed and it's great that you found an older tech with the knowledge to even begin to work on tube driven equipment. I sometimes wonder what will happen when all of the great (and in my mind superior) understanding of electronics is gone. I hope that somehow it is passed down through younger people interested in the golden age of electronics. I am in my early 40s and grew up in the wake of this era, and luckily enough of the stuff was stored and often used when I began training in high school. Most of our school's donor sets were 50s and 60s models back in the 80s. We even had a Predicta in the lab! Then it was just oddball junk for the most part; the Predicta that is. I'm also glad to have been taught to read an actual VOM scale as all of our meters then were Simpsons. Later in college when digital meters were common I used to love the electronics (digital) wiz kids scratch their head as I did my lab work with one of the last two working Simpson VOMs.