WELCOME TO MY WORKSHOP
Central Maine TekWerx has evolved from a small business into the home for my many hobbies. The business was active for a few years before I returned to full-time employment. These days I enjoyrepairing and restoring vintage computers, electronics repair, 3D printing, and whatever interesting project happens to be on the workbench this week. I primarily focus on the 8 bit Tandy's, but I've also dabbled in the Atari 8-bitters as well. I also have a few PC systems based on the AMD K6 series with one even having a Voodoo 3 card. But that's not all, as Billy Mays would say.
I also spend time sharpening my electronics repair skills. For a while I was an Electronics Technician in the U.S. Navy. My Navy electronics training may be a few decades old, but it gave me a solid foundation—and it's still paying off today. I've not got an almost full lab of basic test equipment and I buy broken things to fix. Sometimes. I've been working on repairing devices from a Tandy CoCo 3, a Colecovision, and a Sonos speaker that is currently the bane of my existence. My CoCo specific articles will continue to remain over at Tandy-TRS80.com, while Central Maine TekWerx is where you'll find everything else—from electronics repairs and 3D printing projects to retro PC experiments and whatever catches my interest next.
WHAT TO EXPECT FROM MY WORKSHOP
The randomness of my hobbies is on display here.
1. Top right, is a highly modified CoCo with a true lowercase mod, remote power switch, and a quite rare Dragonfly cooler. This unit was taken from an eBay acution, and more info on this will appear over at the Tandy site.
2. Below that is a 3D printed case for the Philharmonic 12 by Retro Innovations Philharmonic 12. This device adds numeous sound and music features to a CoCo and is quite high quality.
3. Bottom right is a case I designed for the Sega joypad adapter designed by John Linville and built and sold by Neil Blanchard. I wanted a unique look and left the top and bottom layers set to zero.
4. Bottom middle are three of my capacitor testers. This image was for an article I wrote on my reluctance to fully endorse re-capping vintage equipment, which can be found at Tandy-TRS80.com - RECAP THIS!.
5. Finally, bottom left, is one of the images of my testing a CoCo 3 that I purchased from Brian Wiesler in the CoCo Discord channel. This was a known bad CoCo 3, producing no video. The image is a video waveform that checked out good. The ultimate culprit was a bent pin in the GIME socket. There are two articles about this unit, mostly due to multiple problems with it. Start with this one.
