 greetings perforator friends. So my search for the manual for this Remex RPS6122 was not successful. Rob tries to fix a thing. I did a little bit of searching and I did find in this issue of computer world from 1976 an ad from Remex and it actually shows a picture of the thing that I have and it's actually a perforator not a tape punch but anyway so that's that and Remex was actually a subdivision of Xcelo corporation which as far as I can figure out made machine tools so this was primarily used to control CNC as we would call them at that point NC for numerically controlled machinery and of course the N the numbers came from the tape and this is where you would perforate the tape it says it's 120 characters per second tape perforator and this is specifically for the 6120 series the right perforator configuration for mini computer NC test and photo type setting applications so this is basically what I have so I also found the manual online from bit savers for this which is a combination reader and perforator so I figured well why not I'll just downloaded and see what I can find so now the interesting thing is that this is the mechanism of their combination model and interestingly it looks extremely similar to the one that I have so there is this spool and there's the usual tape path and we have one two three four five things and here we also have I guess one two three four five things and there is the chat holder right over here and indeed this is the chat holder so this is very similar which which is probably a good thing because it means that most likely the mechanisms and the circuitry are the same here is a picture of that wobbly bit that I saw this is actually called a low tape arm so there it is the low tape arm so this is nice because it shows me all of the parts and it definitely should not be wobbling around like that but at least we now know what this is it's when the tape goes low that micro switch gets hit and it basically says oh I can't punch anymore or I can't perforate anymore so that's useful and then there were circuit diagrams so the thing that I need to do is pull the cards and take a look at the oops that's upside down pull the cards and take a look at the chips that are on there and see if they correspond at all to this thing and also when I was looking at some pictures of some of these these rollers were all straight so I'm pretty sure about what must have happened is that this thing fell on this side and this must have hit the floor and this must have hit the floor and this must have hit the floor as well which isn't great take this off yes okay and let's pull the card out this card probably hasn't been out of this machine since it was first built yes okay here we have the card okay so any markings on it 111 821 that doesn't mean anything so what have we got we've got a couple of what appeared to be driver transistors there is an awful capacitor that is probably all the electrons have leaked out of it we have a couple of potentiometers many test points which are nice a bunch of logic chips and then this awful thing which cracked it looks like the housing cracked but it looks like the electrical connections are intact so that's good and it doesn't look like the board is cracked either so this is probably electrically okay okay this is this looks to be like some sort of a driver card because it has a lot of high power transistors in there 1215 of them and an enormous capacitor and many of these fuses the fuses all look okay i'm going to test them to make sure that they are all okay this appears to be a power supply and there is also a board inside as well how about we open this up as well and take a look at it okay i have removed the screws let's see oh wow it's kind of a big big contraption okay this is the enormous beast of whatever it is i guess it's a power supply because it has an enormous capacitor here there's another enormous capacitor inside there on this side is an enormous transformer and here we have a whole bunch of test points with a whole bunch of voltages listed so what i'm thinking is i could just power this up by itself and i presume that this was the power switch and this probably supplies all the power so what i could do is just power this up and test each of these points and see if everything is okay are some chads maybe i'll just take a vacuum cleaner to this first and so i just plugged it back into the power switch i didn't plug in the other thing so hopefully the only thing that is connected is the power switch so let's turn it on careful not to touch many things okay this is 27.5 volts oh wow okay well 34 volts maybe that's because it isn't loaded this one says 35 volts and it's 36 this is minus 12 just about minus 12 here is plus 12 just about 12 here is five volts that's a little over 5.8 volts but again maybe that's because it's loaded it's not loaded down by anything 5.8 volts so i guess that's okay the the reading on the 27.5 is a little concerning because it is quite high by something like you know 20 or 25 percent and the 35 volt is just about on so i don't know whether again it's because this thing hasn't loaded down so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to plug it in and see if that loads the power supply down so let's very carefully probe 27.5 volts well still 33 so that's a little high um i don't know if there is any actual adjustment and it probably doesn't matter because it's maybe just a generic you know relatively high voltage power supply so i removed this poor thing it's uh pretty bent so it looks like it's just a screw inside so maybe i could just very carefully bend it back of course it may break because of metal fatigue but if this is what i think it is all it is is a screw that goes all the way down i can easily replace that okay that's not too bad it's straight and it rolls well let me take the other one off now and this one is going to be a little trickier to bend back because there is no length down here it was just a small thing that fits right into the lever so let's see and no it's not really possible to bend this back um even just trying to clamp down on it will ruin the threads uh i can just replace this and i've got this uh thread checker here so i can see how big it is and it looks like it is a number 632 well this is also very nice um at least with this model it says that the perforator is bi-directional you can actually backspace the tape up to 10 rows which i guess makes sense that there's a limit because if you're punching the tape through here i think it goes through here and then out through this hole in the front panel and then into here which can then i guess spool on to here anyway um you know it kind of makes sense that you can only go backwards a certain amount because otherwise the tape will just get all ravelled up in here so so that's one interesting thing the other interesting thing that i found are these operational modes and there's a tape feed and delete mode which corresponds to the feed slash delete switch in front and when you hit tape feed it will just move the tape forward at 75 characters per second while punching sprocket holes only in feed or all holes in delete so what the delete button does is it effectively deletes the data on the tape by punching all of the holes which is kind of interesting and actually i don't think that i'm going to test this right now because these are the punching solenoids and this board i believe these fuses fuse each of the solenoids so i don't want to activate these solenoids if there is like you know junk in the way or if they um haven't been oiled or used in a while because it also says here um punch head must be lubricated periodically while this thing has certainly not been lubricated periodically um if at all in the past decade maybe so rather than actually try to feed tape through this maybe what i'll do is i'll just take this apart and just do some basic maintenance on it and then and then maybe activate the solenoids by hand okay logic cards are back in and now let's take a look at this arm nothing if i lift this ah yes well that's interesting huh okay yeah well if this is actually punching tape presumably this will rotate as well okay so here are a few more notes uh we have feed delete and this is where i got the information that delete will actually just punch all of the holes uh feed there is a note that basically says that you can't punch while you're feeding it which kind of makes sense here's that perf status lamp and it basically says that the tape supply is nearly exhausted or the optional chat detector goes off and i don't think there is a chat detector on this so again if i turn this on okay and i move this uh low tape arm so that the switch goes off uh huh yes there we go so that is also working so it looks like all the mechanics of the motors are working so really the only thing that's left is this thing which i really don't trust to just turn on and work okay and actually operating the thing using the signals is apparently very easy you need to make sure that the punch is ready the system is ready uh if there is a chat detector that it's not going off um and then you need to apply the direction signal and then apply the data signals and then finally you uh strobe the punch command and the tape will advance one row and punch a feed hole plus the data tracks uh the feed hole is the the middle sprocket thing um and then you just repeat so you know we can just basically punch one character at a time so the next project is to look at this and maybe manually get it going and that will probably be the next video so okay bye bye punch perforator thing rob tries to fix a thing