Thanks for that.
Aaaah, the memories come flooding back. A quick reminisce for thems interested in these things.
I quit my C&G radio and T/V in the black and white days, to start the CPL, but a chance accident with a Sony broadcast quality camera renewed my interest many years later.
A BVP200 was dropped some 18 feet onto concrete, and when the insurance company had coughed up, I was given the bits. It stayed in a box for a year or so, until one night I had one of those epiphinal type moments. Somehow I knew that I could fix it.
The case was die-cast and ruined, but duct tape kept it together enough to hold the mother board and around 6 daughter boards in place. The half silvered prism had set screws that were bent due to the impact, yet the tubes had survived!! ( 90 degrees looking at the prism.) After some hours of neuro-surgery, all I had left was one minute L,, its wires torn right down to the windings. There was nowhere for it to go. At last I opened up the box surrounding the colour tube and there L9 was marked, with two holes. More detailed fiddling, and at 05:00 hrs, a picture of my pilot's watch filling the 27" screen. However, all the colours were bunched up into one corner.
Half an hour on a lathe, and some more fiddling, and everything was registered...I couldn't believe it.
The cost of having a case made was prohibitive, our airframe dept threw in the towel as soon as they saw it. At last I phoned Sony. I guy I recall well said no, there were no spare cases, but since this was last year's model, he had one complete camera that was going into the crusher tomorrow. I begged the case from him but he said I could have the camera for a grand. The lens was worth many times that alone. I had driven the hundred miles to his office by 08:00
I just don't know why I said it, but I asked I there was any way he could sweeten the deal. He said that there was a Camera control unit, out on loan somewhere, and if I could locate it, I could have it. By the most extraordinary chance, I had heard someone mention that Stanmore Video had such a unit and I phoned the boss. He said get Sony to telex him, and send him a tenner for the carriage, and it was mine. I did, and it was. It was worth about a years salary for most folk then.
If only I had DVD s then. Even so some of my home movies were pretty nifty but degraded by going onto VHS tape. Still, the lot sold to an Ealing Studios work shop, and the proceeds gave me my wages for the next year...which was just as well cos I spent about that time out of work.