Re-Record Not Fade Away...

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“Re-record not fade away” was the line I remember the Scotch Skeleton saying in the famous television advert.

Nobody under the age of 372,946 years old will have a clue so here’s a flashback:

Momentary pause: @M1EYP your band needs to cover this! :star_struck:

Today I discovered that some folk don’t re-record not fade away (rather, re-recharge/recycle) when it comes to batteries. Instead they just leave stuff for donks, forget about it and find out when the worst happens.

Today for example, I was going through my camera collection and found these in one of them:

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I haven’t seen Ever Ready Silver Seals in this jacket for aeons. I think the last person I remember having these was a mates nan in her wireless and she’s been gone about 20 years.

It turns out that the Ever Ready jackets in this style havent been seen since the late 1990s prior to a rebrand- I was then somewhat stunned to discover Ever Ready are actually still around. I assumed they’d been swallowed up by Duracell or Energizer or summat.

The batteries in the camera had swollen but not leaked, amazingly. I had to use needle nose micro pliers to persuade them out but eventually they gave in.

I then wondered if these batteries were still available and sure enough on eBay you can find them in good nick - dead, but good nick - for around €30 or so! Apparently vintage batteries can be quite collectable as well as popular purchases for props. Some people even restore them and reuse or resell them.

It then turns out that some folks even collect dead batteries! I thought it must be a load of old cobblers but no, sure enough;

Looking at that site done two things to my mindset.

  1. It gave me a new appreciation for battery jacket design. I almost want to collect batteries. :face_with_peeking_eye:
  2. My KX-1 has a bunch of batteries in it since the start of summer that need checking! :sweat_smile:

Any battery connoisseurs here? Or Ever Ready Silver Seal nostalgia nerds? I remember Blue Seal too. I think those were the big chubby looking block ones you put in flashlights that you thought would light up the dark like a Roman candle, but instead were like holding up a Swan Vesta in the Alps on a particularly dark night.

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I don’t remember if they were “Blue Seal” but the battery that ran my first kit-built one valve radio nearly 70 years ago was blue, it had outputs of 90 volts and 1.5 volts and powered a single 1T4 valve covering medium and long wave. My first experience of ham radio came when I screwed out the brass insert of the coil as far as it would go, finding it brought in various strange noises below the medium wave, and then one night of random tuning brought in “This is George three mike yoke charlie calling CQ 160” to baffle me! That was the start… Those lumpy batteries were expensive but lasted me about a month.

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Took 189ps to find this:

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Looks like Energizer own Varta as well. Blimey, a battery behemoth swallowing up all the brands.

I must’ve misread the Ever Ready history as I thought they were still their own boss. Seems that is not the case!

The big box type ones with the mega springs bouncing around on them?

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Definitely not me! But now that you mention it, they have been a background theme to my life. As a child, they were always a disapointment (1950s / 1960’s) - typically blue paper sleeve over thin zinc case which invariably leaked under duress. Lots of experiments with filament lamps, motors, electromagnets, jamjars of copper sulphate solution etc soon finished them off. And they were expensive in the context of pocket money.

Then there was the promise of an article in Wireless World (IIRC) describing a “dirty DC” charging method for primary cells. It worked after a fashion, but the internal resistance crept up, and the cases leaked even more profusely!

Happy days, but we have progressed a lot since then :+1:

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Was a specific paper used or were they coated in anything? Were they like the ones in the Web Site link above?

Some of the designs are superb. The HK Flying Bomb is cool and the Star Lite one I just knew would be from Japan. Nice designs that you just don’t see much of if at all these days.

With the KX-1 I thought about Lithium batteries but just decided to try alkaline cells to see what run time it would give. Nice as a backup to a dead power bank I guess.

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There is a “big” demand for repro batteries so people can still use the fifties vintage portable valve sets. The ones that used Dx-nn series valves, DL96… 1.5V heater, 90v HT made by many including Ever Ready.

As you can’t get the B126 90V+1.5V dry cells any more, people make small inverters that fit inside the old cases. Or you can download artwork to print to wrap around your homemade box so it looks like a B126.

I was surprised to see BLR121 batteries can still be had new. These are the 15V high ohms range battery for an Avo8. I’d be tempted to wrap 5 CR2032 in series in self-amalgamating tape instead.

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Just thin paper, as I recall. Looked like this:

(Actually, this looks more like thin cardboard, it was a long time ago!)

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Isn’t something similar going on with valves as well and refurbishing those?

For my FT-290R I tried using those dummy shells that are C size but hold AA cells inside them. Not a fan so I swapped them out for Varta Industrial C cells and she’s been happily pootling along on 2 metres like a champion all Summer and still has decent power left in her.

I’m usually running the 290 set to Lo and the Microwave Modules attached so probably why.

@G4AZS I vaguely recall seeing the odd paper jacket on a cell maybe once or twice but we’re talking probably mid to late 1980s. The big beefy springy block things though I still see pop up now and again and are 99.9% of the time the classic Ever Ready design that looks like Zebbedy on a skiing holiday.

Bring back artsy battery jackets!

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The ones that I could afford were about the size of a box of Maltesers and had wander plug sockets on the long narrow side, one pair for 1,5V and one for 90V.

I remember such an article but it was in Short Wave Magazine, as you say, it worked after a fashion!

I don’t have a valve data book any more, but I suspect that Dx-nn valves were equivalent to the 1T4, 1S4 etc that I used in my early 1-V-1 TRFs and later in simple superhets before building a mains PSU and using 6.3V heater valves.

Damn! Its all coming back! I’ve got a couple of boxes of valves somewhere, do I build a reproduction for old times sake, or remember that you can’t cross the same river twice?!

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Battery nerds, this is a bloomin’ good read (probably because it was written in 1993) :

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The batteries I remember most from my childhood were cheap things from discount stores. The stores were the forerunners of poundland. We had 2 I can remember, Allsorts and Oobidoo.

Flying Bomb were the brand.

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That name rings a bell. Either I saw that in the high street once a bazillion years ago, or I’m getting confused with:

Those Flying Bomb batteries look absolutely magnificent. What a design. Them and the Star Lite jackets I would love to see in shops even as a limited run, whoever owns the mark for them.

Oh and as an aside, I ventured down a small rabbit hole on the Scotch tapes. Apparently the fella that did the voice of the skeleton was a chap named Deryck Guyler.

He’s been departed a good while alas, however he left behind some quality trivia!

He was the narrator for the famous BBC documentary from 1979 about Fred Dibnah:

He was an expert washboard player and played in a washboard and xylophone duet with Sir Patrick Moore in 1982 (makes me wonder if either of them played with the legendary Cal Tjader?), and played the washboard on not one, not two but THREE tracks of a Shakin’ Stevens album… at Shakey’s request as he was a fan! Who knew!? :exploding_head:

All this from finding two old batteries in a camera this afternoon. Apologies all. :sweat_smile::face_with_peeking_eye:

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Unfortunately the external design was about the only good thing about them.

The rectangular 9v PP3 had a gold foil top design too, that was a real nice look but only lasted about 10 minutes in my Gakken Mykit System 7 (nows theres an item that takes me back - one of those electronics kits with the components on a board with wires and springs ).

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…great read about the battery :+1:

Geoff vk3sq

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A friend collects the old batteries, Ever Readys Flying Bombs etc. He has a large collection. There is a group of us who occasionally repair radios and if we find any old batterys we ask if he wants them in his collection.

The demise of the PP9 9V brick batteries means taking the stack out and putting two 6LR61 rechargeables in parallel.

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I’m surprised that brand’s not been resurrected for doing Lithium cells, I’m sure those would be a big hit with the airlines :grimacing:

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Apparently the crowd that made Flying Bomb also made other cells named Blue Dove and Bright Night.

Sounds like a dealers pill menu… :rofl:

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Here they are, the crowd behind everyone’s new favourite batteries, Kai It Battery Factory in Hong Kong.

Quite the story behind them too.

https://industrialhistoryhk.org/from-chaoan-to-hk-kai-it-battery-factory-蓋一電池廠/

Oh and a word of warning. DO NOT click the archive link to the news report under the PDF link. It doesn’t work any more and instead leads to some err…artistic photography for adults…

:face_with_peeking_eye:

Blue Doves for the hard-core battery rave posse!

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Hopefully that kind of nonsense has been shut down by Free the United Kingdom from Drugs and Britain Opposed to Metabolically Bisturbile Drugs!

https://youtu.be/k0tMvxV-GC4?is=pk_W9HlJlrTp7UOQ

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