Today on the bench, a little bit of a fun unboxing,
of my Signal Corps US Army Tool Equipment TE-50B by the Nanasi Company Incorporated.
If you follow the channel, you know that we restored this Navy Teletype from 1940, which was
deep into pile of rust territory. It was quite an adventure. It involved stripping it to the bone,
bathing it in a teletype-quarium, disassembling it entirely, lots and lots of cleaning, adjusting
stuff, adjusting more stuff, reassembling stuff, more reassembling, making confetti,
printing cryptic messages, sandblasting rust away, doing just a bit of rewiring,
work with beautiful tubes and deadly voltages, making a few finishing touches, and voila,
she is all pretty and functional again, ready for intergalactic transmissions.
Link to the epic series in the doodly-doo. But how did Mr. RTTY maintain his machines
when he was in the army, particularly when it is full of unusual hardware?
A true Teletype technician must have needed special tools for his trade.
And that’s what I finally got today, the one and only TE-50B US Army Teletype maintenance toolkit.
And this one apparently has not been opened, we're the first ones. It has a copy
of the equipment list. Actually I should scan (it), I couldn't find this anywhere. So let
me take a good picture of that first, and I'll be back with you. Okay, I'm back, it's been scanned.
It has a flappy flap.
All right, so, what do we have? In the corner over here those are gauges. Oh, that's really awesome.
You have three of the round ones, and one of the flat ones. 6 mils on this one.
And on this one, oh, 2 mils! And it goes up to 80 mils. Very, very nice. And I didn't notice but
each pocket has a different width to accommodate the right tool. All right. In the other corner,
those are little wrenches.
So wrench, wrench socket, wrench open end, pin straight. Why would you have
a set of pins, and they are the same pins? All right, so I put them back in the right place.
Now down here, what do we have? Those would be other wrenches.
Ooh! This is a burnishing tool. That's super helpful. That's for relay contacts, when they
don't make good contacts. You put that in between. This is a very very slightly abrasive (material).
Carborundum.
A pin tapered thing. Two of them. What do they call that? A Tommy wrench. What the heck is that?
Ah, okay, so that's a Tommy wrench. You insert it in a hole, and you turn like this, to provide
you with some leverage. There are two of them. So this must be the thickness gauge, and this
must be the alignment tool. All very useful things that I wouldn't have thought to put in my toolbox.
Oh!
Is it an oiler?
A brush
What I think is an oiler.
So they say: spring hook pull, spring hook push. So it has to push a spring. Stick. Contact file.
Dental mirror. That is indeed an oiler. I should have a brush, and a ruler. What? What? I don't
have a ruler? I've been bamboozled! There's no ruler? Or it's been put somewhere else?
Let's see if I can remove the protection from the mirror. Man, this stuff is sticky. Even with
isopropanol it doesn't go away. So the thing has undergone some chemical transformation somehow.
Now, I was able to save it more or less. And actually, this is not only a mirror,
this is a magnifier. It has some curve to it. Very nice!
And here, there is supposed to be a gear puller. And here another screw driver, a
socket screwdriver, two of them. Oh, a super duper screwdriver. Oh, that's a good one. There we go.
So, that's a screwdriver that can hold the screw,
and it's very very long. So you can fish the screws at the bottom of your Teletype.
Make everything clean - probably horse hair, actually.
Oh, this one is very long, and those are very fine. So,
that's another problem that we had with Teletypes, is that the screws,
they are much finer than my screwdrivers could go into. And this ones, I see, are super extra
fine. These are to be used for Teletypes only on, or they'll probably mar other screws.
The set of gauges. The spring gauges, which I already have used to repair my pen plotters.
It's used to tension the belt, which I can do now, thanks to my Teletype tensioner.
A little bit over 1 when this touches. I readjusted all the tensions actually,
they were completely off. So this is much better now. It just stops on its own.
All right. Slips when it should, and doesn't slip when it should not. Repaired!
This one is 4 lbs. 12 lbs. 2 lbs. 8 oz. That definitely saved me for my pen plotter.
We have some Imperial Flint Paper, 3M Company, Minnesota Metal Mining. Still with us today.
An emery cloth, same grit which they call three over zero.
Carborundum company, Niagara Fall. By the way, in the same pocket,
I found my missing ruler. Maybe I also have the puller somewhere, it just fell out.
Let me clean that beautiful ruler! That's super finely engraved. Union Tool Company
in Orange, Massachusetts. Nicely done!
And on the top there, that's the most fascinating.
These are (used) to calibrate the rotation speed of Teletypes, and we'll have to do it one day.
And we are done with the top drawer.
This is one of the most beautiful voltmeters I have seen.
Tada!
Signal Corps multimeter TS-297/U from Weston Electric. Those used
to make the good telephone gauges. It has Ohms, so there's a battery in there.
Look at that! Wire wound resistors, or something like that? Precision resistors?
Yeah yeah yeah, because you got the schematics here. Tells you how it's done.
It's a good old regular battery, I think. Maybe. It fits!
So, they are definitely not the regular banana plugs. This is also a test lead,
but so you can plug it in straight into a Teletype
Ohms. Oh, nicely damped.
And I'm sure you wonder how good it is!
One - two - three - four - five. No, it's good! Six - seven - eight - nine
and then ten. If I put it on the four scale, it's going to be easier to read.
One - two -three - four.
Okay. Good meter! Excellent.
Biggie biggie soldering iron. Oh my goodness!
You hook that up to the battery of your Jeep or your tank. And you have an iron, soldering,
110 volts. This is just ginormous. It's 40/60. So it's Lead-Tin 40/60. Better clean my hands
after that. Look at that monster diameter here. This is for big big solder joints.
More wrenches. Very cute! I have never see one with the angle like this, but that's very handy.
A set of... So those are hex wrenches, but with kind of a super long neck.
Those are all interesting tools.
Ooh! I don't know how you call that one, but that's first special nuts.
What the heck?
Adjustment thingy? It's a bender of some kind maybe?
More of those beautiful wrenches. They are very thin. So, they're really useful specialized tools.
Oh! Measuring tape.
To make your teletype advance manually, left threaded. Oh,
that's probably a good tool to have for the Teletype.
Oh! A very cute screwdriver. You can can have screws that are already under something.
That's pretty neat.
Oh, you hold the screw, and then you screw it in. So it's a screw holder,
and a screwdriver. Yeah, this is actually a screwdriver.
So it goes like this, and it just holds your screw in place. Pretty cool!
Bell sealed bond paper substance 20. Feels like cigarette paper.
So that's to make a very small shim of some kind?
A bag of desiccant. Class 1 desiccant, approved
under military spec. Which actually is probably why this box is in such a good shape.
Heney Chenney Hammer Corporation,
established 1836. This hammer is forged from tool steel and is guaranteed against defect.
And that's the little oiler needle.
You put it like this, and you can do a calibrated squirt of something.
So, that's for adjusting eccentrics.
Or is it the magnet? Oh, it's magnetic. It's a very weak magnet.
So you can you can pick up your screws. So that's a screw picker.
A good knife. Okay, always useful.
Tape. Oh, it's still very sticky.
Sloth tape. Oh man, it smells like 1930. Some kind of tar tape maybe?
Wrench. Sticky sticky sticky. So unfortunately, this is probably an
imperial wrench, I cannot do metric screws with that one. Oh man, it's all stuck.
There are in oil paper so they wouldn't rust. That's pliers. Wow, completely stuck.
Yeah, it's a greaser.
Okay, so these need to be cleaned and brought to Hand Tool Rescue (laughter).
Oh files, more files. Gee. A round, a flat.
Bleach cheesecloth! Oh, very neat. Oh, excellent.
There's the manual for the multimeter. Two of them! Definitely, I need to scan that one.
When I looked the multimeter up, I didn't see any of this coming up.
Well guys, that's it. That was
our box of military Teletype tools. I am going to use it, after I clean all the tools.
Oh, they clean pretty good.
So, it's just the oil that has congealed. But it has done its job, it has protected the metal.
I was able to get the adjustable wrench unstuck. So now it's going to do both inch and metric!