Many apologies everyone! I know I said I’d put up my musings and it’s be a little thin (Ok, non-existant, gimme a break!). One of the reasons is that I’ve been pulled 20 ways to Sunday in the last few months, especially with getting things ready with the Store. We’re selling mostly on eBay right now but hope to officially open the store and let people buy directly without that awful %19 fee that we pay them.

What to look forward to

So here’s things you have to look forward to. If you’re especially interested in any of them please do let me know! I don’t mind moving things around a bit for my wonderful audience (KNOCK, KNOCK, you’re out there, right? 😉 )

FrankenTRS

So this is a machine I’m featuring at the FRANKENTRS.COM site. RACSII.NET was my bringing my original TRS-80 Model I back to life, but sadly after a year the hard drive crashed. I’ve been a bit lazy, but plan to put an PDP8ONLINE (David G) MFM_EMU on it and getting it going again. The point of that project was to get it running again on the SAME EXACT hardware it ran on in the 80’s, which I did! So, given I had to be completely original there, I decided to create a machine that I sorta made from new and old, and even other manufacturers. 🙂 I hit a huge stumbling block on a disk drive I wanted to attach, but I think we’ve gotten past that, so I can probably get back to that (Especially since I won’t be freezing in the lab anymore. 😉 )

Shop

I’ll be talking more about SHOP.TUCS-WORKBENCH.COM . We have a lot of great things there already, more coming, and some ORIGINAL things not offered anywhere else too! A few of the examples –

Denty TRS-80 Grey (Mercedes Silver) Paint – The best matched paint out there! Besides the spray cans, we now are offering pens, brush cap containers, even pigment! If you don’t notice from our instructions, this really needs a lot of shaking. 😉

George Hines TRS-80 Floppy Remapper – This allows your Model III, 4, 4D, 4P to be able to remap 4 floppy drives. Want to boot off an external disk, no issue. Have a Gotek as 0 and Floppy as 1 and want to boot from 1, no issue. Just use an OUT command in basic and reboot!

Floppy Remapper cable for 4P – Along with all the other new cabling we can do (2 and 4 disk drive for Coco, Model I and Model III, Composite Video cables, Model I Keyboard/CPU cables) we’re offering pre-made cables to use with the Floppy Remapper in a Model 4P.

PIC and EPROM Programming – We also offer a wide range of PIC’s and EPROMs we can program. Send (or buy, we’ll be offering limited PICs/EPROMs) us your device, upload your code/hex and we’ll program and send it back! Things like PIC’s for FreHD, EPROMS for Diagnostic Roms or other things! Doesn’t even need to be TRS-80!

JLC vs PCBWay

As many of you know, once I find a good vendor, I’m loyal as he!_!_. I’ve been getting my hair cut by the same person for the last 46 years, even though I have to travel 1 1/4 hours now to get to them. I was on a project in Australia for a while and they had to send me home to get my haircut because I refused to get it done there. I had another vendor decide to stop doing business, and I and another person begged them to re-open. They’re now building racks of machines for the likes of Meta. (And before Meta, me 😉 )

I’ll tell my story of using both services for a bit before finally settling on JLC (Settling being the key word), and how bad a decision and how much it’s hurt my business this early in its start! I can’t imagine that what I went through I was alone in, just by the shear number of problems I had all along and how they (didn’t) handle it. It was so bad that I’m start to wonder if I was targeted. I know that’s an awfully strong statement, but what else could explain it given their size. As always, YMMV but don’t expect any mileage.

Moving items from TODO to WASDONE

If you take a look, there’s quite a few things currently in the REPAIR RACK . These are items that I’ve bought to work on. Things I plan to do –

• Clean them up (I’ll go into how I retr0brite)
• Ensure they’re working properly (Disks, right memory, etc)
• Floppy Remapper (Yea. 😉 )
• Speedup boards or Grafyx adapters
• Goteks as boot drives
• Possibly FreHD for 2nd drives
• Recap power supplies

As I do, I’ll document so the new owner can see all the care and work I put into it! Once done, they’ll move to the Repair*ed* rack ready for some love

Tandy Assembly 2025

Tuc’s Workbench is a sponsor for Tandy Assembly 2025 as well as plan to have 1, HOPEFULLY 2, tables. We’ll have the FRANKENTRS alongside items we have for sale. If you’re interested in buying something there to save on shipping, PLEASE LET ME KNOW. If we don’t have the 2 tables, we’ll have to limit what we can display/bring. We’ll be trying to see if we can at least bring the PIC and EPROM programmers and chips for any “on site” needs. 🙂

NEXT UP

Given how fresh the whole JLC vs PCBWay issue is in my mind and my saved emails, that’ll probably be the next thing you see. STAY TUNED, it’ll be quite the article!