Tool Gloat Simpson 260

[mickeyf]

Another good thing you can do with an analogue meter is quick basic capacitor tests on large-ish capacitors. Ohms range, probes across the cap. Hopefully, the needle jumps up and drifts down. Or goes nowhere, or goes up and stays up. With practice, you can even get a pretty good idea what the drift rate means. (Kinda like the guy they used as a voltmeter by measuring how high he jumped when they connected him to the circuit, or putting your thumb over the spark plug hole to measure the compression... )

Digital meters update what? Once per second typically? An analog meter does not give an instantaneous reading either, but it is limited by the reaction time of the coil & movement, which is much faster than that.

This one looks an awful lot like the Lafayette I build from a kit in the early 60's as a barely teenager.

[thebigron]

I too have a 260 from days gone past. Used one at a power plant for 28 years almost everyday. A fine instrument indeed. My story is on the way to work 10 years back, I was passing an early morning yard sale starting up. When I stopped to investigate, an almost new Simpson caught my eye, and I couldn’t hardly believe my eyes as the tag had $11.00 dollars on it. Normally one might want to haggle the price down, and that is why I thought it was priced at 11 bucks instead of 10, just to give the buyer an opportunity to "haggle the price down". There's no way I was going to try to drop the price down a dollar, an eleven dollar price on a 260 is a rare find. Believe me I was embarrassed and shamed when the lady pointed out the price was $110.00. I had turned a quick glimpse at the tag into a 90% discount.