When Work And Hobby Collide

     I do electronics for a living.  It's also my hobby.  In recent decades, the hobby side has tended more and more to very old stuff, equipment using vacuum tubes and related technology, and includes vintage ham radio and broadcast equipment.  At my age, the stuff I collect and build now is pretty much the same as the ham gear I could afford when I was young and the audio and RF equipment that was in daily use at the small-time stations where I first worked.

     My present employer has a big, in-company event coming up, a confab for the top brass.  Who, where and about what doesn't matter.  What does matter is that it's large enough that they need a sound system, and my department was tasked with setting it up.  Amplifiers and speakers were easy; we already have them for gatherings.  They needed several microphones, and we already owned a nice modern interface widget that serves as microphone mixer, digital interface and just about anything else they might need or want.

     But we needed a microphone stand, the tall kind that sit on the floor, and it needed to be decent-looking.  I knew where one was, one of the tough and ubiquitous Atlas Sound MS-10 or 12s that can be found for as little as $50 new, so I retrieved it, gave it a quick clean-up, and put it in the room.

     At the last minute, we needed two more.  There wasn't time to order them, and the local suppliers of previous years are mostly gone.  I remembered another likely spot where more Atlas stands might be found.  There was only one there and the black base was dinged and rusty, the chrome-plated pillar dull.  Okay, fine; a quick clean, refinished the base with a super-large Sharpie, and polished the whole thing with Nevr-Dull.  (Including the base.  Sharpie ink transfers easily and is a bit too shiny unless you take steps to control it.)

     That left us needing one more.  I've been hoarding the location of a couple of vintage RCA 90-A floor stands.  My employer's are well beat-up, but it's a 1937 design by RCA's John Vassos, who had a real flair for Art Deco.  These are soft matte nickel and brushed aluminum, and feature a "magic clutch" adjustment: to raise or lower the stand, you give it a push or a pull, using a little more force than the weight of RCA's heaviest microphones: it goes where you move it and stays there!

     Pretty as the the design is, ours were dented and filthy, the threads for the mic clip tarnished.  I've been leaving them alone; they're worth quite a bit of money and I saw no reason to attract attention to them.  Now I needed one.  I picked the best of the two and spent a couple of hours with various cleaners, a paste of baking soda and water, fine emery cloth and water, and metal polish.  I chased the threads clean and made sure the magic clutch was working smoothly.  I got paid to do the kind of thing I do for fun: restoring the stand to respectable utility.  There's more that could be done; the brushed aluminum base is a cover over a cast-iron weight and it would benefit from some body work to get the dents out.  But it'll do.