Measure up: a beautiful vintage meter.

So a meter is a meter is a meter, right?

Bzzzzzzzzzz.

image

This monster is nearly eight and a half inches wide.

image

Neat scale.

image

Spade tipped needle.

image

The passive scale illumination: a ground glass band on top allows ambient light to light the dial.

image

Connection post. This isn’t exactly a blazing sensitive meter– putting a digital multimeter set to ohms across it yields no visible deflection. (Some meters peg!) Setting the DMM to diode check, which usually applies 5mA or so, gave me about a 61. Please admire that rough carpentry. I love finding things like this!

image

Better view of that nicely made wooden base. Unlike the edges of the connection post holes, the outside is immaculate.

image

Dwarfing a Gossen Lunasix.

image

Hand written serial number.

What was this made for? Judging by the lack of any visible brand name, wood tabletop base, and unusual scale with no units, I’m suspecting it was a classroom/lab piece. You’d calibrate with a known voltage reference and do the math yourself. You know, old school nonsense. 😉

The low sensitivity is curious too. I’ll have to test later and see just what scales out to a 100.

I did open the meter briefly because there was some loose material rattling around that I didn’t want damaging the movement. An old wire wound spool resistor is mounted inside in parallel with the movement, likely for damping. It looked similar to the spools in my Weston but covered in cloth tape instead of wax.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.