"T i m" wrote in message
...

But then that may have been money down the drain if the problem was a
faulty charging circuit or a faulty DC-to-AC inverter.

True, but nothing you couldn't have tested initially with just a
voltmeter?

I did: something like 180 V RMS into a high-resistance load which dropped to
about 30 V with even a nominal load - I managed to find a 25 W cooker bulb
and lashed up a connection to it and even that caused the voltage to drop
immediately. I *think* (though it was a while ago and I may have forgotten)
the voltage returned to 180 when the load was removed (leaving just the
voltmeter) so it wasn't just that the battery was flattened. That's why I
wonder whether the inverter was shagged-out.

But I should have persisted with it... Ah well.


I remember buying it from
a back-street Army surplus shop somewhere near Cemetery Junction in
Reading
soon after I got my first job.

Not something I would expect to see in such a place.

They had all manner of surplus electronic kit from various places: TVs, tape
recorders, radios, record players. I even saw a broadcast-standard open-reel
video recorder of some strange format. Great big appliances with big knobs
and valves or else circuit boards of discrete transistors - not an IC in
sight! I think the manual for my scope was dated 1968 so the technology
dated from then. I bet nowadays you can get a little oscilloscope adaptor
with USB output for recording and display on a PC. The shop was a real
Aladdin's cave of stuff - shelves full of things that most people probably
wouldn't even have been able to identify. It was a shop within a terrace of
houses - a real back-street "you'd never know it was there" place. That was
in the mid-80s; I doubt whether it's still there now.