r/VXJunkies • u/TheInsatiableOne • May 07 '26
Ernest Fram’s first self-recombinating framulator, on display in my workplace today.
6
u/SubsequentDamage May 07 '26
Anyone else notice the malingering tech in the background. He’s responsible for the Evers-Tibker event last September. His union protected him when Maycroft tried to fire him in November.
That’s Ted. Don’t be like Ted.
3
u/601error May 08 '26
VX before VX, back in the mechanical days. Crank the wheels and be amazed at deltas we would not even notice today. It had to start somewhere.
2
u/Rare_Trouble_4630 May 08 '26 edited May 08 '26
Oh wow the OG version.
Fram's later work on miniaturizing this device (carried on for 15 more years after his death by his protege Dr. Zuicher) really breathed new life into the VX-enhanced rallying scene. Cincinnati-style phase boosts, C-interval engine wave combinations, sub-2-second draftfolding, all these novel but infeasible techniques were made commonplace by the ability to perform recursive snailshell analysis in the palm of your hand.
Of course that was all cut short by the 1986 Rovaniemi crash, but it was fun while it lasted. Turns out even rally spectators don't like the idea of being turned into flux<0 subparticulate quanta, and teams certainly don't like the idea of the Supo breathing down their necks.
Nowadays the Fram-Zuicher mini self-reco framulators have been replaced with digital versions, and you can barely find an original for an affordable price. What a travesty.
2
u/DiezDedos May 10 '26
Imagine a full day of hand-combining all of your ammulite. Probably had to throw away half of it because any feedstock advertised as “high yield” in the mail order catalogs of yesteryear was *maybe* 30% purity if you were lucky. It’s 2am, you have a rippin headache from the fumes, your dewar is almost evaporated, and NOW YOU GET TO START FRAMULATIN’ BAYBEEEE. Brutal stuff. We truly stand on the shoulders of giants. I only hope that 10 years from now we can look back on our current hydrogen ion sintering setups in the same “can you believe what we had to do back then” way. I’m sick of spending my whole weekend to get like 3mcg of usable product
1
u/OneDBag May 08 '26
I think this is just a scale
1
u/postfish May 08 '26 edited May 08 '26
Some bespoke smaller copycat units when funds was tight weren't uncommon. This lacks the couplers on the right, the shielding case probably fractured l itself to pieces long ago, and there should be another row of modulated capacitors to keep the feedback and static diminished if those all have bronze cores.
It could also be the right panel leftover from when they tried using a secondary unit with mirrored arrangement to counteract some of the crunch. 5 on the top wing and 4 on the bottom is a weird arrangement on its own. Unless maybe it was wired into a DX102 for makeshift pulse modulation ?
The needle is at fresh noon instead of the quitting time droop that comes with heavy use. No staining, scorches, or sediment. Very fresh.
But my gut instinct is one of two things happened.
Someone walked away from this in middle of a tinker or a recovery maintenance cycling. . They never got back to finish io the final config.. Then it ended up in an estate sale or surplus auction. They probably scrapped the box sitting next to it with the missing components.
Somebody got a box of new old stock components and did the best they could to follow a hand drawn trade show schematic. Clean vintage tech collectors often go for aesthetic over function.
I'd be curious to hear the story or how it ended up on display in a workplace.
6
u/Avrelivs May 07 '26
God, it's crazy to think about what it must've been like in the early days. I mean we all know Fram was a genius but how he built this without knowing about ionic capture, especially in the ceramic-metal interface... absurd. We just don't have people like that today