, and I
will do my best to locate it, if it still exists. |
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In addition to the large stash of TMC manuals, my co-conspirator Bob McClain K4ATP and I took charge of all of the company's drawings, again thanks to the generosity of Neil de Pasquale. These are cataloged in a series of notebooks that list the drawings in drawing (but not strictly chronological) order. The contents of these notebooks were hand-transcribed into tables that make up the core of this section of the TMC website. Then the drawings were scanned at full size, and the scans individually linked to the tables.
Below you'll find links to these tables, and inside the tables, links to individual drawings. This area has been under development for many years, but thanks to a recent acquisition of a large-format scanner (and 8 months of labor!), the project is essentially done as of September 2023. See below for a discussion of the state of the project.
If you need a copy of one of the drawings for a restoration that is not
presently on the website, please send me
mail at , and I
will do my best to locate it, if it still exists.
| Searchable Tables of Drawings | This link takes you to page that provides access to searchable lists of TMC drawings. This area has been under construction for nearly 20 years but is now essentially complete. |
| Canadian Drawings | This link takes you to scans of two notebooks containing "Canadian Prints", drawings made by TMC Canada for systems and units designed there. It appears that the Canadian drawings use the same letter codes as TMC US drawings. |
| Project Jenny Drawings | This link takes you to a searchable set of drawings for TMC's Project Jenny. TMC was the system implementer for the broadcast equipment flown by the Blue Eagle squadron during the Vietnam war. The Blue Eagles pioneered flying TV broadcasts and were the first of a long line of airborne broadcast planes operated by various government agencies. The drawings in these pages have numbers in the 8000's and because of their special interest and peculiar application, they are listed on their own separate set of pages. |
| Notebook Scans | This link provides access to the scans of the notebook pages. You can look up the drawings (circuit, sheet metal, assemblies, and so forth) for any given rig, but you'll have to do it the hard way, but pouring through these pages, which are organized chronologically! Since they're hard to use, they're just here for reference. |
| Signature ID Page | This page shows examples of initials signed to various TMC drawings and documents. With considerable help from Tony Faiola, this table makes it possible to connect initials with specific engineers at TMC. By examining the schematics and mechanical drawings, and comparing initials, it's therefore possible to tell who designed what! |
When Neil de Pasquale put TMC's entire drawings, manuals, and photographs into our care, it was our intention to build a digital archive of everything we had received, as a resource for collectors and restorers of TMC equipment. At the time of this writing (9/18/2023), nearly all of the thousands of drawings and nearly all of the unique equipment manuals have been scanned and are available online on this website.
There are gaps, however. Quite a few drawings are just.. missing. It's likely they were pulled from storage and never returned, and they're undoubtedly lost forever. While many drawings from TMC Canada are on hand and scanned, many are missing, including essentially all of the size-2 (B-size) drawings. There are two classes of drawings that are on hand, but that I've chosen not to scan. These include:
Most un-scanned drawings are located in 7 large plastic tubs, each with roughly 150 drawings on board.
Three of these tubs contain CA- (cable) drawings, and are hand-labeled "CA Tub 1", "CA Tub 2", and "CA Tub 3". A listing of the CA drawings and tubs can be found at CA Tub Listing.
Two tubs contain CK- (schematics) drawings, "CK Tub 1" and "CK Tub 2". A listing of the CK drawings and tubs can be found at CK Tub Listing.
A sixth tub, "Misc Tub", contains a mix of other drawing types, including A-, AX-, ID-, MS- and various other drawing categories. A listing of the Miscellaneous Tub contents can be found at Misc Tub Listing.
A 7th tub contains the roll drawings that have been scanned to the Searchable Drawings pages. If you need to locate the original for one of these drawings, you can find a listing of the drawings at Scanned Tub Listing.
Several smaller tubs contain most size-D and size-B drawings that have been scanned.
The bulk of the B, C, and D-sized drawings (2,4,8) are located in large metal drawing files:
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| Pair of huge metal cabinets containing size-2 (B-size) drawings in the bottom drawers, and 4- and 8- (C and D) in the upper drawers. Blue tape labels were used to track the state of the scanning project. | Smaller drawing cabinet full of additional C and D drawings. The bottom 5 drawers contain PC- (printed circuit artwork) drawings that I've elected not to scan. |
Essentially every B,C, and D size drawings in these cabinets have been scanned and are available in the Searchable Drawings pages. The larger format drawings were scanned on a Colortrac SmartLF 36" scanner acquired in February 2023. This project took up most of my free time from February through September, 2023.
Size-A (size-1) drawings are located in standard horizontal filing cabinets.
These include Specification documents and Material List documents for each TMC product and assembly. There are many thousand of these drawings and documents in these cabs, and those that have been scanned are in the Searchable Drawings pages.
Back in 2008, Bruce Berman W2XR described a visit to TMC's headquarters at 700 Fenimore Road in Mamaroneck NY, and a long discussion he'd had with Neil de Pasqual about the contents of the building. With the slow demise of TMC as a viable company, Neil had begun turning over the very valuable real estate of the building to Majestic Kitchens, a high-end kitchen fabricator, and he needed to relocate the assets of TMC. These included a huge stash of equipment manuals, 1000's of photographs, and many 1000's of drawings.. basically the entire stash of ephemera from TMC's many years of operation. Bruce persuaded me (not a difficult job) to get in touch with Neil to see about taking charge of all of this stuff.
Beginning in 2008, and over the next few years, I made a number of trips to Mamaroneck, and got to know Neil, who turned out to be a terrific guy and a great friend to me and to the TMC collecting hobby. The trips were typically made in a cargo van, and each time I hauled away more and more of the "stuff" remaining from TMC.
One of the first loads was a couple dozen banker boxes full of TMC manuals. Over the space of about 5 years, I purchased a very fast scanner (my second one of these is shown below) that could auto-feed large stacks of documents, scanning both sides at once. (This class of scanner is essentially the top unit of a typical office copier.. but with no printer.)
These scanners allowed me to build the large the fairly comprehensive digital archive of manuals for TMC equipment that many collectors have found useful over the years.
On another trip, Neil entrusted TMC's enormous stash of photographs into my care, and that fired off another massive scanning task. There are many thousand photographs including extremely high-quality black/white photographs of TMC's equipment, photos of the company's various plants and facilities, equipment installations around the world mainly for the US government, particularly the US Navy, and photos of TMC people and events. Many of these, though not all, have been scanned at high resolution and are available in the TMC History pages of this website.
On other trips, I hauled away various bits of equipment, parts and supplies, and on one memorable journey, the Di-Acro sheet metal tools (brake, bender, and notcher) from the metal prototyping shop at the back of 700 Fenimore. (Those extremely high-quality tools have been restored to their former glory and are working perfectly, 70 years after their original purchase!). On this, or possibly another visit, I got to haul away the famous "TMC Sign" that graced the front of 700 Fenimore for many years. It's awaiting restoration, but it's in great shape, apart from the "T", "M", and "C" letters.
But.. the giant cabinets full of drawings that lived in a special room in the heart of 700 Fenimore.. were just intimidating. I couldn't figure out a good way to fetch them home on my own, nor did I really have anywhere to put them. A few years went by, and Majestic Kitchens was expanding more and more into the former TMC headquarters. Neil really needed either to find a home for the drawings or (gag!) dispose of them.
By this time I'd been in touch with Bob McClain K4ATP, one of the most avid collectors of TMC equipment I've met over the years. Bob became very interested in the drawings, and worked out a plan to fetch them from Mamaroneck to a storage facility near his QTH in Manassas, VA. He and Sheldon Daitch WA4MZZ rented a big box truck in August 2010, drove up to Mamaroneck, and loaded up the drawings file cabinets and tubs (see photos above), then hauled them down to Manassas to a self-storage location. Neil was touched by the keen interest Bob and Sheldon expressed for TMC and its beautifully design equipment, and wrote this email to me and Bruce Berman expressing his gratitude that the drawings could be saved:
Bob McCain and Sheldon Daitch (Resident Engineer, Kuwait Transmitting Station) arrived yesterday morning for the TMC flat files. All A-, B-, C- and D-size drawings were loaded onto the truck in about an hour along with roll drawings, specification sheets, material lists, model/part number assignment notebooks and two (original) serial number registers. All I have left are a half dozen boxes of photos and a metal cabinet filled with 35mm aperture cards of all the drawings given to Bob. Bob and Sheldon seem to be upstanding individuals with a deep, abiding interest in preserving TMC’s significant contribution to shortwave history and legend. They promised to periodically keep me up to date on their progress. I will also solicit updates from them.
Again, thanks for your help, Bruce. I could not have done it without the help of you and John Poulton.
Best regards,
Neil (Aug 3, 2010)
Over the next few years, Bob did yeoman service cataloging, organizing, and generally caring for the drawing stash. When requested, he made trips to a local copy center to scan specific drawings for collectors wanting to build or repair TMC equipment. During that time, on multiple visits to Manassas to visit with Bob, I hauled back the A-size (size-1) drawings to my QTH in Chapel Hill, and began creating the drawings archive. On one of the Mamaroneck trips, Neil had given me the binders containing the comprehensive list of TMC drawings, and over the space of a year or so, I transcribed those lists into electronic form to build the tables you'll find in the Searchable Drawings pages. I have to thank my employer, Nvidia, who unwittingly funded this effort; whenever I had a few minutes during the work day, I'd transcribe a few pages from the binders.. eventually, and much to my surprise, the job was done! Now "all" I had to do was scan the drawings, and link each one to its entry in the Searchable Drawings tables.
During early 20-teens I purchased a used Colortrac wide-format scanner, and delivered it to Bob. We had considered the possibility of scanning everything in the stash, but that job just seemed far too ambitious, so we (mostly Bob) began by picking out drawings we thought might be interesting, scanning them, and eventually adding them to the website. Bob also bravely dove into the roll-drawing tubs and attempted to catalog the contents, a monumental task.
But.. this effort gradually ground to a halt. The Colortrac I'd purchased was old, and no longer fully supported, so it was difficult to use and very slow. And, the job just seemed so large as to be quite discouraging. In 2017, we decided mutually that the best way forward was to put the entire TMC stash in one location, my QTH, figuring that would allow me to push forward on the scanning project. So in December of that year, I rented a box truck, drove to Manassas, and loaded up the stash. That was a pretty difficult task, as it turned out, and it left me with huge respect for what Bob and Sheldon had done 7 years earlier. Every TMC collector should recognize that those two guys accomplished a remarkable 'save' for us, creating a unique opportunity to build a complete archive of a major electronics company from the 1950's - 1980's!
With the stash in a newly acquired 40x60 shop barn that I'd just purchased, scanning could get going in earnest. I finished up scanning the A-size drawings, then tackled the B-size drawings in the large bottom drawers of the TMC cabinets, greatly facilitated by the fast table-top scanner, which could easily handle stacks of B-size paper. The process was: scan a batch, separate the batch into individual files for each drawing, named using the TMC drawing code, move the scans one-by-one to their appropriate drawing directories, then link each drawing to its drawing number in the searchable drawing tables. This portion of the scanning project was essentially finished within about a year. And there the project ended, for all practical purposes. A few abortive attempts to scan the larger drawings on the old Colortrac just reminded me how difficult it was to use.
In February 2023 I experienced a bit of an epiphany.. I'd been given charge of these drawings, a unique and inherently interesting electronics archive, and it was up to me to deal with it appropriately. So, I decided to spring for a brand new wide-format scanner (thanks, Nvidia, for making this a possible and really pretty easy decision!). Photo below shows the scanner, a tub of scanned roll drawings under the table, the cleaning supplies that are needed (often!) for the scanner, and the manual and photo stash in the background.
This scanner proved to be just what the doctor ordered for the scanning project! I started by scanning a few "important" drawings for often-collected TMC equipment, and gradually realized that scanning everything was actually a real possibility. So began a 8-month effort to work through most of the drawing stash and add the large-format drawings to the website. After working through most of the C and D sized drawings, one day I decided to try a roll drawing,.. just for the hell of it. I happened to have the schematic for the GPR-90 handy, a drawing that's about 30" wide and about 6 feet long. I had to tape a paper "helper" to the leading edge of the drawing, damaged and curled over the years to the point it would not go into the scanner. But, once that was done, the scanner ate the drawing up and spat out a PDF, easy as pie! The only issue with the roll drawings: dirt. The scanner has to be cleaned after each small batch of these drawings, making the task a bit time consuming. For that reason I've chosen to scan only the schematics (CK's) and a few other roll drawings that seemed particularly interesting. But, as long as the archive of drawings remains with me, I can scan additional roll drawings on demand.
So, the drawing scanning project is essentially complete. What remains to do: