Repaired an abraser the other day
What’s an abraser you ask? Well, it’s a device that has two abrasive wheels that are pressed against a plate with paint on it. The idea is to determine the wear a certain coating or paint will get with a number of revolutions on this device.
Anyways, it was acting up the other day and the guys at work asked me to fix it since the numbers were jumping into the thousands quite quickly. Since this device counted revolutions via an interrupted beam of light, I simply stated that it was dirty. I was right, it was just a bit dirty and after blowing the head out and looking at the signal, it was fine. What surprised me though was it’s electronic construction.
Surprisingly it was nothing more than a PIC-based protoboard with a transformer and a gearmotor, I was surprised that it was so sloppily put together. Here are some images of it in case anyone is interested or in case I wish to refer to them later.
A shot of an (older?) Taber Abrader
This is the inside view of a Taber abrader
As is evident, they used a PIC16C71 for their little project and soldered it together on a protoboard, very strange for company that’s been in business for so many years. They even used cables that didn’t have the correct number of wires in them, they simply trimmed the excess wire, sloppy!
The Amp Hour Radio Show
Steven,
I just stumbled onto your posting and wanted to clarify that the instrument you refer to above was not manufactured by Taber Industries.
Well, a little panel on the back said ‘taber industries’ on the back. I don’t think I would have called it a Taber abrader otherwise since I’ve never seen these devices before. I no longer have access to the device to confirm though. Perhaps it was a chinese knockoff calling themselves Taber?