"gareth" wrote in news:lt1tsc$8ie$1@dont-
email.me:

Firstly, there is the aliminium casting for the front panel, and
secondly is the rotary arm coupling to the tuning condenser
to linearise the frequency coverage, amongst many other mechanical
achievements.

Clearly the Stratton people knew their onions when it came
to designing and producing radios.


I limit my CAD for mechanics to an early version of SketchUp, the main
advantage beign an ability to make clean lines, erase faults as if they'd
never been, try new ideas and revert painlessly, and to turn the model in
three dimensions. In the past, the fact that makers likely had to do design
and also handle real parts they made, meant the brain fed back detail that
kept their vision clear. Even so it is admirable.

On the other hand (not radio related, exactly), I have built from expired
patent and base principle (I find other's code utterly impenetrable so have
not plundered any), an entire polyphonic, multitimbral FM (actually, phase
mod) synthesiser, with a few tricks that not even Yamaha managed.

In short, while it is amazing what people in the past acheived, it is also
true that in 1980, to do what I can do alone, it took a university professors
(John Chowning) and a large multinational company (Yamaha), and 10 years of
research and development to do! It's still taking me a few years, but it is
at least possible, and not so long ago it was beyond any practical dreaming.

There is real art in old radio parts though, especially the tuning
capacitors, and those old hybrid canned parts with chokes and caps and such,
especially in the context of a small forest of valves.... The intricacies of
my PhaseMod synth, while fun and no ends of cool, are hard to sell to a
public who woudl see even LESS of that wonder than they do when confronted
with an actual hardware dedicated IC. But such is the price we pay for the
power....