A note from our technician Chazz at the Sunflower Flower Repair Station with photographs by assistant tech Erin Martinez...
Recently a very curious piece of equipment was donated by the grandson of its creator. This piece of mystery equipment was custom made by the grandfather from scrap parts to be thrown away at a university in Texas. The grandfather was the head electronics technician for the university in the 1970's and needed some very particular test gear for some of what he was to work on.
There are logic chip test circuits of some kind, a cassette transport ripped from something, a small speaker from a television, transport controls and adjustment panels from some kind of tape machine, power supplies and much more.
I had heard about this contraption from the technician's grandson who is close to my age. When I saw it in person I was just as impressed as I was by the grandiose description presented to me in our previous conversations. There was so much purposeful re-use of high quality components and direct tangible bits of proof of the brilliance and ingenuity this man possessed. His know-how and ability mixing mechanical and electronic talents are becoming so much more rare to find these days in a world of apps and DSP reliance.
Each piece of this test set will be re-purposed to the best of our abilities and the rack enclosing the test set will be re-furbished and utilized in our in-house analog recording studio but before we do that, we wanted to document and share this one-of-a-kind piece of history!
We're lucky to get the chance to tell the tales of those who are no longer on this earth and carry the torch into the future.