telexforum

I had a day at the Nuclear Bunker today, and was having a bit of a tidy up in the teleprinter room.

I opened a very dusty cupboard, and look what I found :)

it looks to be a line current version, perhaps over the weekend I will clean all the dirt from the machine, and then delve into the electronics to see if it can have a short play on I-Telex.

IMG_20200529_142147_707.jpg

I think it might be ex Reuters - there are a couple more Transtel machines at the bunker (they all really do not belong there, but the owner will not dispose of them)

At least they have a home safe from the scrapman

Some of you are probably sick of hearing about the mad happenings in my radio shack, but for those of you that are slightly interested, please see some of the ramblings from me regarding the ongoing process of restoring the BT Cheetah 85 Teleprinter.

I must firstly thank Rainer, Henning, and Werner for their help so far-each of you have played a part in getting this far.

So, to set the scene.

The British Telecom Cheetah 85 and 87 Teleprinters are both very similar electrically, they were a joint venture with SEL Lorenz, and the Lo3000 is almost exactly the same machine in a slightly different case. This machine appeared on eBay earlier this year, and was a fairly good price (£75GBP) It was located in the North West of England, so required a 3 hour drive to collect it - At this point it is fair to say that my long suffering Wife accompanied me for this trip, and she does not share my enthusiasm for all things old and electrical.

My original plan was to use this machine as a source...

Not really a restoration, but at the end of last year I purchased a T56 FSG from eBay.de.

It is fully functional, but the cover was badly scuffed.

So, RAL6014 in Satin finish is a reasonable match to the original - I still need to wait for the paint to harden before doing a final cut back and light polish, but the results are acceptable.