Repairing The Sony DT-30 Television Snooze Box 

The clock is still running perfectly after a day or so... but dammit I am probably going to have to open it up again and put a couple more bulbs in there. Just not even enough illumination still.

Looks like it's been well looked after it's really clean inside.

Had one of these that I never could get working right again! Glad to see one in more capable hands

I remember my parents had the clock / Betamax unit in their bedroom for years as a kid and if you went in at night you’d see the green glow from it in the corner. I think only one bulb worked for a long time in it (not the one for the timer).

That's some purdy tech!

Even if it is for video recorders I could see it being used for television too. I had tinnitus for about a year once and leaving the television on made the ringing disappear so it was much easier to sleep.

Mad props Fran. In tight things like this clock, I'd go absolutely mental if I also had to make sure I film the process properly=P

This makes me wonder, what will the future bring us, I mean, right now we are living the digital era, the device portrayed at this video was is from a mechanical era. By how things are going, I think that the next era is the quantum one, or probably a mixture in between quantum computing and AI.

Probably better to have the lamp dim, nothing worse than a bright alarm clock in a dark room when trying to sleep.

That is easily the geekiest thing I've seen in years. Great stuff. Thanks, Fran! Just sane... :^) Saint

aren't those screws JIS, not Phillips?

maybe houses back then didn't have grounding?

What kind of automatic wire strippers do you like? I had a pair like that when i worked in the refrigerator factory but i haven't seen them since.

27:03 what silicone tape do you using?

That's so cool

Any fear of electric shock is ungrounded.

I've long suspected eBay actually sends an "eBay" scented spray to sellers because it's so consistently the same smell.

Sometimes I miss the construction time music you had in your old videos, like this one ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-5mGeko4fcE8.html

that's redundant: television is the snooze box.

Fran, this timer isn't for turning on and off a TV - it's for scheduling a recording on your Beta VCR! You'll notice that the on time is just over 2 hours, a little bit longer than an original Beta tape. You'd pre-set your VCR (which had piano keys - not soft touch controls), and when the timer turns power on to the VCR, it starts recording. Then when the tape runs out, the VCR stops, and then the timer turns the outlet off shortly after. I have one of these on my shelf - the backlight neons were burnt out when I got it. I replaced them with ones from green indicator lamps from Radio Shack... and they didn't last long before they were burnt out too. I got some new green neons to try again, but haven't started the project yet. Your great install is urging me to get started!

Actually the one I had was bundled with a Betamax unit to do timed recordings. It even had a clip to hold it to the top of the betamax unit. You can see the gap in the back under the outlets where the clip went.

Running neon bulbs at higher currents causes sputtering and they turn black. They probably ran them higher to get a decent brightness. Have seen many black neons over the years. I doubt it is air contamination, more just normal aging even when run at lower currents. Orange, green neon an VFD's always have a warm nostalgic glow for me ;)

You are *not* meant to turn the [Timer Set] in a clockwise direction. It's only meant to be rotated in one direction only (counterclockwise). You can damage the mechanism.

Fran!!!! Use LEDs!! Power up some green LEDs with AC power across a full bridge rectifier, without electrolytic filter. You will get the same 120Hz shimmering light as the neon bulb do. Neon buld are shimmering at the double of the grid frequency, because they glow at the positive peak as at the negative peak, reversing the glow from one electrode to the other.

Betamax timer. I had one of these back in the day (1977). The deck had no built-in timer. Was an extra-cost addition. Also, the deck had all mechanical controls. To make a timer recording, you turned on the deck and set the tuner to the channel you wished to record, then turned the deck off. THEN you pushed the record control, which would latch into place. When the timer applied power to the deck it would then start recording and run until the tape ran out.

4:02 no, you're not breaking the rules cause you ARE qualified personnel!

Your repair videos are as calming as watching Bob Ross painting lil happy trees. Thank you.

The black inside the worn-out neon lamps isn't carbon. It is metal sputtered off of the electrodes.

If it's got numbers (or fingers) then it's digital 😂 At least vaping fluid isn't a contact poison, like nicotine. I guess.

I recall something very similar to this being used as a timer for the Betamax to start it recording at a time. i remember showing our school librarian how to use it to record an event that was happening over night.

It’s so relaxing to watch you at work, and interesting at the same time. I love working out how things work and seeing them bought back to life. You’re a star Fran , love from UK 🇬🇧

I love my shrink-tubing, 𝘽𝙐𝙏 I’m curious about exactly what kind of silicone tape that was?

Re- the eBay smell... I have a few friends who sell on there. While two of them vape, all of them keep their packages in a room that's absolutely flooded with those Airwick deodorizer things. Its almost like they're trying to fumigate their items from bad smells.

Could easily feature in a Columbo episode! 😁😎

Fran you are literally a national treasure. Thank you so much for keeping the old school "hacker" spirit alive in it's truest sense.

@19:09 Man, where would we be without magnetized screwdrivers, huh?

Hey Fran, you have very cool content and I learn something every time I watch your videos. A while back you did a video about a plate echo box. My dad had a Sansui RA-500 Spring Reveb Amplifier I loved it. That video help bring back some great music memories of Record players, 8 Track tapes...it your Marvelous electronic wizardry have you considered making your own device that can replicate that Mile long cathedral tiled in Gold effect? I would be very interested...

...But the shrink tubing looks so much nicer

@Fran Blanche .... you need JIS phillips head screwdrivers - it makes it harder to strip out those japanese phillips screws - they fit the slots as they should instead of the way the standard phillips translates rotational motion into linear by popping out. They get WAAAAAAY better bite.

There’s something super nostalgic about that green glow and I have no idea why or what from. For some reason it’s reminding me of going over to my grandparent’s next door neighbor as a kid in the 80’s, who happened to be the actor David White (Larry Tate from Bewitched). The only memories from his place are it being very dark brown (very 80’s!). But he had these glass vases full of these big blue marbles. He even gave me some! I bet they’re still at my parent’s somewhere. 🙂 Thanks for the memories.

This seems similar to the Pioneer JT 215A which Techmoan covered a few years back

Sony, electro mechanical, were awesome and they managed to transition to electronic and still be awesome. I try not to wince watching your disassembly - as a kid, I was brilliant at taking things apart, but I pretty much had a 100% reassembly failure rate. I think in the end, that tools were hidden. Saw your pencil and pens YT today, no idea why a 6 year old clip was suggested and remembered you questioning, why do people comment on old stuff? Anyway, you said about your thigh graphite tattoo from '74. Remembered my thumb pencil stabbing from '73-'74 - actually googled graphite toxicity, can't blame my thumb "lead" implant for anything. Enjoyed the threaded frustration near outburst :) Another great project, thx.

Minor correction, grease is saponified oil, basically a mixture of a soap and an oil; when the oil disappears, what's left is the soap; the reference to lithium or calcium indicates which metal the soap is made from, calcium soap, being relatively insoluble in water, is used for waterproof greases.

36:45 At last, somebody with a good set of wire strippers. :) Great vid, Fran.

You are amazing and I love watching you work and how you explain things, even the most uninformed person can understand what you are doing. Wish I would've found this channel 10 years ago, stay wonderful and thank you!

not smelling like vaping , you just bought Chinese stuff that smelled like the plastics is vaping out some volatile's , Amazon an US company is great in mostly selling Chinese stuff. with is kind of funny. US having troubles with the Chinese while buying there stuff for 20 years (since we dont want to do that work let they do it for pennies) since well we do need to make fast money ! congrats, fucked by crappy materials and gave away there money.. and now it becomes annoying :) its weird how it works. people get greedy and fill the bank of someone else then gets annoyed by it since they got so much power. same goes for the EU. to be fair.

Flat blade? FLAT BLADE?! Oh please! C'mon Fran! As your excellent take on plastic threads;, spinning the driver backwards before forwards (which should apply to any threads plastic or metal) surely PLEASE(!) use a JIS screwdriver! This is a Japanese unit, and has screw heads with the dot next to one of the splines. Please, pretty please, buy a set of JIS screwdrivers! Anything Japanese you repair will thank you for it! Loving your work BTW!

Use bright LED's for the whole thing, Just use a driver board for all.

You are just like all of us Fran Fans. We don't settle. It is perfect or it is in the junk bin. (The one we have in our house. We keep almost everything. (No Styrofoam. We can get that at MacDonald's). You have mastered this 1970's ish masterpiece. (My stab is 1973-74).

Hi,having watched many of you videos I know how you are obsessed with nixie tubes and displays, yes I like them too I used to build frequency counters and digital clocks, my very first clock used bridge rectifier to double the 50hz mains freq to 100hz to divide down to 1hz, now my latest have a 16mhz crystall osc. my home made freq counter has a 5mhz reference and has 7 segment led displays. I still have and use two venner/maldon electronics freq counters that use nixie displays, that was the company I used to work for back in 1967-1970. I also worked for REVOX repairing tape decks and amps. I am retired but still do electronics. keep up your good work, very interesting videos.

Thank you for showing this timer. It’s designed for turning on a recording device at a certain time I think, not for powering your television. All that work and you didn’t finish? I’d love this for my Sony esprit collection. No lights match I’d have to redo it.

I absolutely LOVE using heat shrink tubing. Yes, you need to be careful while soldering, but I find the end result is work the effort :-) Insulates and provides extra mechanical protection.

Fran, I've got this same exact timer...except it's branded Zenith but no doubt made by Sony probably. I had the same illumination problem. The alarm dial lights up nice but the other two green neons I put in there barely illuminate. Barely can see it in a dark room. Now your clock looked pretty bright but that probably was your camera adjusting for low light. Wish there was a way to put in LED's but with the whole thing running on 120 volts AC, that's probably not possible. I might take the good alarm dial light and put that in between the hours and tens-minutes.

No worries about it not having a three prong outlet. You could say your concerns were "ungrounded".

Put the synchronous motor on a warming plate for a coffee cup. Warm it up. Put some light sewing machine type oil around the gear, then let it cool -it'll pull the oil inside. Repeat that a few times. That'll dilute out the more gummy fluid inside the motor. The 0 jewels is because this is a synchronous clock, which obtains its sync from the 60hz (or 50, depending on the motor), rather than from a balance wheel in conjunction with an escapement. The jewels were usually synthetic ruby that were used as bearings with extremely low friction. Pocket watches had between 7 and 23 jewels, with some going nuts and adding more just to add them. 7 was usually enough to make a well lasting watch or clock. Cheap 'dollar' watches had no jewels. When they started moving to the synchronous electric clocks, and then the quartz watches, they reverted to saying "no jewels" to make sure people understood that these were not standard wind up clocks. Some of the better quartz watches _do_ have jewels for the bearings, as they do still have the same mechanicals inside, just a different method to keep the time. Most synchronous motors don't have grease in them. They were filled with oil. The oil just loses viscosity over the years. If you check the clock forums, you'll find that most of those clocks were really intended to be 'serviced' every 10 years (often replacing the motor assembly). Instead, they were left running for decades.

Used to use them to turn on Betamax VCRs on ,back in the 1980's. They rarely failed. The ones we had WERE 3 prong. But we were a school system. Used one on my desk for years after we got ride of the Beta machines.

As several people have already commented, this was a Sony Betamax timer from the mid to late 1970's. My father had one of these with the first VCR we ever had - the original Sony Betamax. The deck didn't have a built-in clock or anything. It had piano keys like an old tape recorder, not buttons. Still, it was amazing technology in it's day. The clock was an accessory for making unattended recordings at a later time. After setting the timer with the time of the program you wanted to record and setting the channel, you would press the "record" and "play" keys with the power off. When the timer switched the machine on it would start recording the program you selected. What was even more amazing is that since the original Betamax L-750 tapes were only 90 minutes long (not quite long enough for most movies) Sony created another accessory called an automatic tape changer. This was a completely mechanical device. It didn't plug in to the wall, it had no batteries and no electronics of any kind. It would sense the end of the tape when the keys popped up and then it would push the "eject" key, wait a few seconds for the first tape to eject, pull the ejected tape into a holding tray and then it would drop a new tape into the tape tray, push the tape into the mechanism, push the mechanism down into the machine, wait a few more seconds for the machine to thread the new tape, and finally it would press the "record" and "play" keys at the same time to continue recording on the next tape. When you loaded the fresh tape you had to pull down a lever which stored energy in a spring. It was enough for a complete tape change cycle. The whole process took about 15 seconds and it was fun to watch. It was like watching a Rube Goldberg contraption. It was clearly designed as an afterthought and it was amazing that it worked so reliably. How far we've come since those days!

Cute. As a teenager, I built one of these myself out of a flip-digit clock, to turn my stereo system on and off with the timer. The SPDT microswitches inside allowed me to configure the alarm timer and sleep timer to turn the system either on or off at designated time. As I remember, the alarm was active for about two hours, plenty long enough to play an LP record, and would have been long enough to fill a SP video tape, except that consumer VCRs weren't even a thing yet.

"we're going to break all those rules right now." The mantra of every maker. 🤣

Trivia time Fran. Sony are famous for their "rubber latex snot" that goes conductive over time due to heating cycles. Highly likely it was leaking current across that olde green fluro neon lamp connect pins & helped cook the series 33k resistor...

I have one of those "clocks" as well. Sadly it stopped working. I tried the lubricant on the motor thing, which helped but eventually it would stop on cold nights. I think the motor may be failing as it all turns freely.

Why not replacing the neon bulbs with LED?

I ran into warn out Neon lamps similar to these in my old Electrolux Regency vacuum cleaner. I only had regular clear glass NE2's to replace them with but I would have rather had green lamps like you were able to source, which apparently have a green phosphor inside coating on the glass which is excited by the ionized neon gas. They look good and are much more visible than the natural neon illumination.

Neon bulbs tend to darken with time, AFAIK not from carbon, but metal deposition inside the glass capsule.

That kind of item was never very bright. Everything is ridiculously bright now.

I just bought one of these from Ebay . It is non working of course. I took the motor off the gearbox and the gear on the motor shaft is spinning on the shaft. Will super glue keep it from spinning on the shaft? Great video!

Fran, nice! Any consideration of moving the left bulb to the middle and using the 1/4 lights on the ends? Might help balance it out. 🤷

Would bright green LEDs work? Would it give the same effect?

That green is absolutely mesmerizing..is it just me? I think my grandparents had one of these. There is something familiar feeling about it.

I have one of these. it's branded as a zenith and came with a Betamax VCR my parents bought when I was a kid.

its a nice but probably unintended feature, but this clock can't be left flashing 12:00 like VCRs.

How can anyone hate shrink tubing? It's one of the most fabulous things ever created.

No way you could convince me tape is better or easy to use than shrink tubing. Been soldering for 40+ years and have never had a situation where the iron was shrinking the tubing while soldering.

Think I'm going to start adding "from a vape-free home" to my ebay listings!

Fran. Why dom't you use shrink tube precoated with glue? Then you can split it and wrap it around the connection. When you heat it it will bond to itself at the same time it shrinks.

Small LEDs and or rectangular would probably fit from the top or bottom.

Green neon bulbs sputters to death as ionized gas molecules bombard the electrodes breaking it atom by atom._

Those digital timers were a lot of fun back in the day. An old boss talked about how he used one in the early 80s to turn on and off a boombox at set hours, to piss off squatters that he couldn't kick out of one of his apartments, due to some legal loophole. He later repurposed it to turn on and off the neon signs in the front window of the pawn shop he ran, and that I worked at.

That vaping fluid smell is the same with ebay stuff here in the UK too, Fran.

Sleep timers don't work for me. I wake up once the background noise stops.

When I was a mail carrier I hated delivering vape juice the whole car would stink for a day after

Wow RU-vid recommended something that I liked!

Фран любит "цифровую" технику! Fran loves "digital" devices!

so this device could power an external relay that then switches higher loads, massive all round house xmas lights ?

vintage clock digital flip down very cool repair You cover it so well Thank you

When my mom was young in the late 60s she had a digital watch that used drums to tell the time. I saw it years ago and we can’t find it so I don’t know the brand.

I couldn't care less about some crappy old bedside clock.....so why is it so fascinating to watch Fran fiddle around with one?

That is a very nice looking clock.

I noticed that the am/pm indicator was not showing green,,,maybe there,s another burnt out neon globe in there?

Way to go Fran! So adventurous! Thanks for being you!

i have a GE alarm clock that uses tank tread like segments as a display. if you want it you can have it.

where do you get all this "retro" gear? is there a shop near you or do you do repairs for a living. sorry if youve already addressed this.

Techmoan would love that

Its not a cam , its a cog , a cam would be lobe shaped by definition .

This Is nice after a kind of downer day

Wikipedia says this about green neon lamps: A mixture of 95% neon, 2.5% krypton, and 2.5% argon can be used for a green glow, but nevertheless "green neon" lamps are more commonly phosphor-based.

Do a second channel, wheres the full on how many hours it takes to fix

I replaced the little green bulbs in one of these a long time ago!!!

TVs have always been class 2, no ground

Fran just use two LED's anti parallel ....