oooh look what I found?

[The bad one]

Was doing a bit of pottering tonight looking for some connectors to fit my computer speaker up on the wall in what passes for my office. On the bulk(why's it called a Bulk? No idea at all!) above the stairs I have boxes of electronic stuff, wire, resistors, project boxes, pots,buzzers and many more electronic things that haven't see the light of day for many years.
Not since I stoppedmaking all sorts of electronic pike back biters and conversions forall manner of electronic bite indicators.

In the box I cameacross these, that I kind of knew I still had but couldn't have toldyou where.
Anybody remember them?More to the point still use them?

​

These two I modifiedfrom the original Optonics, the ones with a short wire from the headto a sounder box that was best used open to hear the GPO speaker.
These Optos really got beaffed up, the buzzers in them are 110 dbA buzzers, bought from Maplins Electronics when their shops were specialist Electronics shops. The nob on the side is a volume control pot as the buzzers would wake the dead when they went off.


Did I find what I originally went looking for? No as with all pottering I got sidetracked with all this fascinating stuff I rediscovered :confusion:

​

 

[peterjg]

Yes, I also have some Optonics which I converted. Still used occasionally.

 

[flightliner]

There you go--
Bought them new in '79 for £20 each and been in constant use ever since, never given me any problems or reasons to be rid of them.

 

[The bad one]

Are those the Les Bamford conversions Flight?

 

[The bad one]

I'll put some others up later with a bit of a write up, which was a project me and Derik Quirck did some 20+ years ago. When I've finished the pottering job I started in the first place. mg:

 

[flightliner]

Are those the Les Bamford conversions Flight?

Bad one, no, A guy in Rotherham did them for me, never saw or new who he was as I left them with a tackle dealer who outsourced them.
Whoever he was he was worth every penny of the £6 I was charged for each of them.
Long long ago now back when I was heavy into carp fishing.

Anyone guess what the two green plastic tubes are for btw ?

 

[sam vimes]

I think I still have a pair somewhere, unless I've given them away. Mine were likely to have been later versions and were unmodified. Though they were about as good as it got until the first proper Delkims came along, they were pretty rubbish. The fact that a cottage industry of modifying them was so prevalent should indicate that they were never as good as they could have been. I wouldn't use mine now, I've got far too used to alarms that don't tip over at the merest provocation. That little horseshoe key into a screw clamp was a neat idea that just didn't pan out properly.

 

[The bad one]

Well I said I'd post some more picture of the project that Derek Quirk and myself did 20 years ago. The one on the left of the screen is the joint project we did.​

Quirky worked for a car manufactures as a lath turner I seem to recall and had access to all this high end computer tech the car plant had. So he loaded an optonic box on to the computer scanner that wrote a programme for cutting out the ABS plastic block after tweaking it a bit. I made and installed the electronic guts of it using a magnetic trigger switch mechanism about 18 months before Fox launched their Magnetic bite alarms.
The idea of usingspinning magnets had come to me, as I'd been using them for 6-7 yearspreviously in my Pike backbiters. The double armed, minus the dropoff arms, is the one next to the Optonic type indicator in the photo.

Why did I use Spinning Magnets in my Pike backbiters? I and my mate Dr John were fishing a water that was well pressured and the fish would take the arm up to the top, feel the tension and drop the bait without pulling the line out of the Gardner clip. As anyone who has used the standard buzzer pike drop off will know the buzzer only goes off when the line pulled from the clip and the arm drops.
As we were missing takes because the line wasn't pulled from the clip, a radical solution was called for where the arm could be lowered to give travel upwards and sounding the buzzer as it did. My first attempt was done with a cam system triggering a micro switch both on the up and the down travel. It worked quite well but I was never entirely happy with it. Another friend was having problems with the latching system on his Delkim conversions.Yes people Delkim did optonics conversions long before he created the Delkims of today. The latching system worked on a magnet and reed switch principle I seem to remember. The magnet/switch didn't trigger the buzzer, that worked on the photo electronic diodes as optos did.
Having seen thisprinciple triggering the latching system it wasn't a great stretch ofcreative thinking to come up with a spinning magnet principle. Totrigger a reed switch with each polarity as it passed the reed. Ittook a couple of tries to get the distance away right, and bingo wehad the problem cracked and converted more takes into fish on thebank.

Once this problem was cracked it didn't take another great leap to work out the principle was sound for building into an optonic using a regulating chip, which from memory was a NE555 chip. A bit more trial and err and it was solved and put into the Quirky boxes.
Not bad for someonewith little knowledge of electronics is it really.​

 

[mikench]

Anyone guess what the two green plastic tubes are for btw ?

It has to be mini phials of JD!:wh

 

[flightliner]

Phil, interesting post, I was interested in your using spinning magnets , maybe just co incidence but around 1985 I was carping on a notts pit where another carp angler was using the very same thing as yourself . He was from the Doncaster area and we struck up a friendship and shared some good fishing over the following years.
I see on your later post that you improved rigidity on the optonics by using optibolts , or did Derek knock you some up on his lathe ? They did what they had to tho, I have some myself somewhere in the garage.
Top marks with the double arm dropoffs , lots of variations available these days but back in the day not so !!--
My own attempts making my own electronic alarms for pike were somewhat less ambitious, they amounted to a pair of mercury tilt dropoffs but I simply borrowed a friends and copied them after buying all the bits from an electrical outlook, it was still a miracle that they worked at all.
These days however When out piking I, ve reverted back to my old optonics with the polyball dropoffs set up just rear of my reels .:fish2:

Mikench--- great try and must try it someday, any other ideas ??

 

[The bad one]

No flight all the external hardware came from Quirky. Not sure he ever did any work on car design bit and bobs as all he seemed to do was foreigners.
As to the green tubes haven't got a clue.

 

[The bad one]

Could the green tubes be one of these?

​

 

[flightliner]

As to the green tubes haven't got a clue.

No, not what you suggest,:wh give me a little time and I'll take some piks and put them up with all the details.
Not my idea I hasten to add but One I!ve taken on board as its so handy:first: