On 08/11/2020 10:42, Adrian wrote:
In message ,
writes
On Friday, 6 November 2020 17:28:38 UTC, gareth evansÂ* wrote:
Does anyone here remember what was the precursor
to the Philips Radionic series?

I am thinking of about 1963 which is a few years
before the Philips X20 et seq came about.

I lusted after one of those kits but with 5 of us
brothers and sisters, the Xmas budget limited
each of us to Xmas presents costing £1 only and the electronics kit
was about £3.


I was delighted to get Meccano. I always thought it was a new Meccano
set, and was occasionally puzzled when discussing projects with others
that mine never matched theirs - I had parts none of their kits had,
and the colours & styles never matched either. Moons later I found out
the kit was patched together from all generations of Meccano,
including some of the earliest unpainted parts, but there were also
parts that I've no clue where they came from, AFAIK they simply never
existed in Meccano. Some 3rd party equivalent I guess.


I(*) used to have a good sized chest of the stuff, some of which was
new, some of which was Dad's (and I think some of that was second hand),
but as it all fitted together, who cared.Â* Unfortunately, during a house
move it was stored in my grandmother's garage, and had vanished when we
went to reclaim it.

Mine was a No 5 set plus remnants of a larger one donated to me by an
uncle. I had a hell of a lot of gears and a motor for it eventually.
Some of it did not survive my attempt to make a mirror grinding machine.

(*) I say mine, it lived in my bedroom, but Dad still used to use it to
make useful things..

Getting back to the original topic, I had a very basic constructor kit,
which I suspect was not new.Â* A piece of peg board, which you laid a
circuit diagram over.Â* The various components were on plastic mounts
with wire clips on each end,Â* the mounts clipped into the peg board, and
you connected the components together with bits of wire.Â* I think we
managed to get a crystal radio set to work once, but in the main, it
wasn't a success.

That was the newer version after the one I described with the manually
assembled spring loaded clips and raw components. I suspect the base
board was the same on both kits. That sort of industrial hole board that
tools get hung up on. OK the transistors had longer flexible leads on
them and some araldite reinforcement around the body.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown