Hi all,
I have been lurking here for a while, building my own Sliders Timer. I recall rushing home in the late 90's from my job so that I could record grainy Sliders episodes on rabbit ears! I tried to make an original timer in '98, but finding the parts was hard on the early web, or expensive. This page has been invaluable to me as I cut into several phones to make my own type of timer. It might sound odd, but I needed a good platform/power source for portable Tesla coils. Mine has some LED displays under a custom screen, on a later Gray 550 Personal Communicator cheapo model. I am making a bi-polar coil, with a design that looks Sliders-ish. I know to be accurate I should use the Lite, but this thing looks way far from accurate. I figure it would pass as an Earth 207 timer, or Universe 353 or something. I will post pics and do a video when I am done, it will run both a spark gap and PWM slayer circuit setup (changeable coils, one bi-polar, one standard). It will have two top knobs, and a bunch of switches and momentaries on the keypad, and my 'black box' is larger than the show, so the sides don't go all the way up.
If anyone is interested, I could post pics of the progress, which isn't much right now.
I have a question, and some really interesting things to ponder about the original show prop:
Who invented the original timer?? The OEM show prop has some really neat characteristics, if you look up some stuff about electromagnetics. The coil on the front looks like a Helmholtz coil, which is used to produce a stable magnetic field. Some of the display readout labels are components of physics/mathematics, as well as some of the lower 'buttons' on the flip-out. Was the front 'crystal prism' focusing light to open the vortex, through the twin coils? If they thought that deeply about it...wow. I can't locate a good still of what was written on Quinn's basement chalkboard, but always wanted to see if some of it was legit physics. The person who made the hero model was really talented. This prop has far more detail and function than any tri-corder, or most other show props.
Thanks!