Current State of the Lab Workbench

I thought I'd give a bit of an update about the current state of Steve's Digital Basement, as there have been quite a few upgrades over the last year.  Many of them inspired by Adrian's Digital Basement along with many other retro and vintage tech YouTubers out there.  I really appreciate their willingness to share the wins and the losses.  I share the belief that the more comfortable we can get with learning from failure and not being afraid to try stuff that we aren't good at, the more skilled we will become.  The perfect is truly the enemy of the good.

Since spending more time learning online about the surprisingly high quality of some of the Chinese devices out there, and since I've always wanted a Digital Storage Oscilloscope, I spent some time learning about the various low-cost brands out there.  I often shop the "Open Box" section of the online catalog at my local Microcenter.   They had this Silgent SDS 1052DL+ that sat in the store for quite a while, after the price dropped a second time, I picked it up.  I paid less for it than what I got by selling my old Tektronix analog scope.  I know that the Tek scope is likely to outlast this one, but in the meantime, I've got a really capable scope and I couldn't be any happier with this major upgrade at the bench.

I've also added a new Power Supply recently, it's a generic supply also from China, but has more current capacity than the BK Precision Model 1601.  I'll keep both for situations where I need dual voltages.

The other add from China is a component tester, it’s capable of doing ESR checks on capacitors, and that’s been very useful as I troubleshoot old devices.

The Hakko soldering station was one of my first upgrades when I started to get back into Electronics and repair, it has been a truly amazing tool.  I upgraded from a non-temperature controlled soldering pencil about 5 years back.  I no longer dread soldering, it's an absolute pleasure to use, and the results are significantly better.

In the upper left hand corner, you can see storage bins, I have a couple of sets of these with common electronic components.  I'm not stocked yet to do recaps and other repairs without ordering parts, but I do have some common components on hand, and I've been able to do some spur of the moment repairs without ordering parts, like recapping the control board on an Apple Disk II or recapping the Apple IIe card in my Mac LC.

Not shown in the picture, I have a tool box off to the side filled with hand tools.  This tool box holds; hand tools,  a Multimeter, and various magnifiers.

On the wish list, I'd love to get a really nice stereo microscope.  I previously had a powered Solder removal tool on my list, but I recently got the manual Soldapullt and this has been such a great hand tool that I'm not sure now that I need a powered desoldering gun.  If I start frequently removing ICs and connectors, I may change my mind about that.  I'd also like to get a hot air soldering gun, this would help with desoldering and resoldering Surface Mount components (at this point primarily to help with the ReCapping that I"m already doing).