We will be back and answering e-mails regularly towards the middle of August. Sometimes health problems are more stubborn than they should be.
Send good wishes, and maybe spare penicillin?
We’re hoping to be back in the office by July 19th, and we very much appreciate your patience!
We hope all of our customers are enjoying the summer weather and doing well!
We’re going to be away from the office for a short while due to medical reasons, so we may be slow getting back to you.
The office should be open again by July 8th, and you shouldn’t have to wait too long for any orders after that.
Jim from Calgary has been visiting and I trust having a wonderful time going through everything that Sphere has to offer. He is giving me things he finds that he thinks will be of interest to our customers and in the next few days , we will be posting them. Keep an eye on all the new items on the site and enjoy the benefit of his vast and varied knowledge. Thank you for your continued support.
As many of you know, Walter Shawlee, the inspiration and technical mind behind Sphere Research has died.
We are now liquidating all the components and test equipment from the company as well as some of the assets.
We have just started to list larger lots of parts and will continue to add to this regularly, to facilitate the liquidation process.
Please let us know if there is something specific you would like and we will check our stock for you.
The products are all priced. However we are open to reasonable offers.
Thank you for your continued support.
To all our wonderful customers and visitors, we wish you the happiest of holidays. Whether you are celebrating Holi, Vaisaki, Eid, Easter, or Pesach, may it be a joyous time with family and friends.
Sunday, 17 March, St.Patrick’s day is when PACE of Penticton, B.C. is having their inaugural surplus sale and Sphere Research will be there. Please join us for a wonderful time from 10:00 AM until 2:00 PM for a treasure trove of all manner of electronics, new and used and just waiting for you to take them home.
We’ve added new categories for Power Supplies and Test Equipment to make it easier to find items that used to be lumped into Other Equipment.
Sphere will be attending the PACE Penticton Electronics Swap/Recycling event on the 17th of March. We’ll be there with several tables loaded with tools, scopes, RF equipment, and other odds and ends looking for a new home!
Hope to see many of you there!
The Stuff Day event held on Saturday, 24 February, was quite a success, and we appreciate all of the assistance that a number of people provided to help us get organized. A particularly big thanks to Chris Walter who helped us clear out and organize the entire workshop!
There is a recycling/swap meet event coming up in Penticton, on 17 March, and we will be brining a variety of tools and equipment to share with the community.
What makes this tomorrow’s Stuff Day so different? You be the judge from the photos. We’ve got equipment, parts, tools, and oddities all sorted, priced and looking for a new home!
This is only a fraction of what’s available, you’ll have to come out to see the rest!
See you all tomorrow (Saturday, 24 Feb, 2024), 10am – 3pm.
A big thanks to our customer Steve who gave us a whole bunch of information on our microscopes, and microscope accessories that had been incorrectly labeled/marked.
We are continually adding to the site on a daily basis, and you will occasionally see new categories added for different types of parts.
Posts are a bit more sparse as we’re currently busy getting ready for the our Stuff Day coming up on Saturday, 24 February. There is all kinds of new and obscure hardware that we’ve found, not all of which is going to make it on to the website before Stuff Day arrives, so there’s a very high chance of finding some very unusual trinkets here next Saturday!
We’ve added a new parts section for fans as we continue to add to the huge collection of fans in our inventory. These fans have been discounted, and many are available with bulk discounts!
Don’t forget to mark your calendars for the Stuff Day on 24 February!
With no end to all the parts we keep discovering as we go through our inventory, there’s only one thing to do…
STUFF DAY! The not-quite Valentine’s, not-quite-spring-break, edition. We’re holding a Stuff Day on 24 February, 2024, details as per the below poster! All kinds of new and strange things as we’ve been clearing out storage lockers to find items that have never been listed previously!
Prepare to be adequately convenienced! We now have an auto-updating page of Recently Added items (button #4 on the page header).
This page automatically updates with the items added to the site in the last 7 days, and is divided into “stuff” and “slide rules”. Hopefully this will save everyone time of having to look across the various sub pages to find the new items that have been added.
We’ve now uploaded a very large selection of assorted microscope parts, optics, and other components.
We’ve started cataloguing and listing our various microscopes and optics, which you can find here under the Optics page. At the moment you’ll find mostly our microscopes, but we will shortly be adding all of the small optical bits and bobs that we are still working on sorting through.
Not wanting to neglect the slide rule fans, we’ve also added more to the various pages, particularly in the On Sale section.
We’ve got more news coming shortly!
We’ve an assortment of new parts to the discount bins (primarily $5 and $10), as well as adding a variety of new Tektronix equipment – some are good and ready to use, some are only suitable for parts.
We’ve added some more Tektronix equipment today, as well as a number of items to the discount bins and Other Equipment sections. Some of the highlights: We’ve added some nice General Radio Decade Resistors.
We’ve just added another huge batch of rules to the various pages, of particular interest are the K&E Deci-Lons. We’ve only got 4 of those rules left!
Today is Faber Castell 2/83N launch day!
Our remaining stock of these rules is now listed, and discounted. They have been sorted into different classes based on scale bleeding and case quality. We’ve also separated them out by case color, so you can now view what we have in terms of remaining stock for both green and brown cases.
Get them while they last! These babies haven’t been produced in over 50 years, and they are as rare as hen’s teeth.
There are also a number of additions to the various discount bins!
We’ve been spending the last few weeks cleaning out a lot of our slide rule inventory. This has meant a lot of previously unlisted, ultra-rare, or highly unusual rules are now being posted online (fresh batch posted today – make sure to check the Other Rules, Hemmi, and Faber Castell pages).
It has also meant that we’ve started looking at what sort of rules we can put together out of existing parts stock – namely the most coveted rule: The Faber Castell 2/83N.
In a few days we’ll be posting a number of these for sale based on what we’ve found in various storage locations, tiered by rule/box/case quality, and we’ll be making them available at different price points. Keep your eyes peeled, because we have a very small number of these rules, and we’ll be listing them at discounted prices.
We’ve added a variety of new parts and items that you can find in the various discount bins, as well as a Biddle Instruments AC High Pot Tester (see Other Equipment).
Stay tuned for some big news related to slide rules, we’ve been doing a lot of cleaning and sorting in our slide rule store room, and we’ll be posting some of the hidden gems we turned up soon!
We’ve just listed some more items to the Tools, Parts, and Other Equipment pages – items listed include a variety of RF relays/coaxial switches, and a very rare GenRad 1867B Digibridge!
We’ve added a number of new parts that you’ll find by looking in either the discount bins, or the Parts page. We’ll also have more books and slide rules going up later this week.
We’ve just added a new section under the Slide Rules category for books. This includes some very rare, and very old, manuals on using slide rules, as well as historical product catalogs from K&E and Dietzgen.
We’ve added an entire page for the growing amount of FLUKE DMMs and probes that’s we’ve got listed, so make sure to check that out!
There are also a number of additions to the Other Equipment and various discount bin pages.
We’ve added a number of new items on the Other Equipment and Probes pages, as well as to some of the Discount Bin pages. The majority of the new items are assorted DMMs and other electrical measuring tools, as well as some new probes.
Backend maintenance on our site has been completed, which hopefully will make the site easier to navigate. Some of the changes we have made:
We will be conducting maintenance on our site during the next two weeks, and will not be posting product updates. The site will still be available, and we will continue to remain open for business.
We’ve just added a bunch more parts and small pieces of equipment to the $10 Bin section of the Stuff Page , as well as some other parts and test equipment. We did recently unearth some vintage test equipment – the kind that comes built into a wood case.
Take a look in the Other Equipment section of the Stuff Page to see more.
A large number of slide rules have been added to the Slide Rules page, with more to come early next week (we’ve got some rare oversize rules that are on the way!).
We’ve also got a number of other things that have been added to the $5/$10/$15/$20 Bins on the Stuff Page .
Mystery Boxes will continue to be on sale until the end of the month, don’t forget yours before it’s too late!
In addition to an assortment of new equipment, we’ve also added a new section on various test equipment probes to the Stuff page. Mostly oscilloscope and digital multimeter probes, but we do also have some logic analyzer probes.
We’ve added $5, $10, and $20 bins for parts and equipment that’s priced to move over on the Stuff Page . We’ve also added a whole bunch of new items under the Other Equipment section, and some new star charts, planispheres, and other slide rules on the Slide Rules page.
We’ve added a bunch of new equipment to the Stuff page, including a Scope Meter, some more parts, and some well-aged avionics. Happy shopping .
It’s also not lost on us that the holidays are approaching, and people need to do their holiday shopping! For the month of November, all of the Mystery Boxes are discounted!
Why November? Because shipping things takes time, and if it gets ordered in November, then we know for sure it will be there in time for the holidays. Discounts are: $5 for the small box, $10 for the medium box, $15 for the large box, and $30 for the ludicrous box!
A large number of new slide rules have landed and been posted to the Slide Rules page. These rules have never been posted, and some of them are quite rare.
We’ve added a large number of assorted pocket slide rules to the Slide Rules page from a wide variety of manufacturers. Be sure to check the Other Rules section, as there are some hidden gems in there.
Added to the Stuff Page is a selection of Tektronix 7000 series modules.
As we continue tunneling through workbenches and shelves we’ve found a variety of rare stock slide rules, and unusual test equipment. The first batch of slide rules have been added to the Slide Rules page, and you can expect more as we start documenting and photographing a large trove of pocket rules that we’ve found.
The Stuff Page also has lots of new equipment, with a variety of HP units having just come back from testing and evaluation (mostly counters and signal generators). We’ve also got a variety of unusual equipment that has been added to the Other Equipment section.
We’ve added a few more freshly tested high-precision counter from HP and Philips to the “Stuff Page”, and we’ve also added two units to the “Parts” section – these items from Rhodes & Schwarts, and EIP, did not pass testing but have sufficient functionality to be useful as parts units to repair other equipment.
Towards the end of this week, we should have more items posted to the Slide Rule page as we continue doing our stock verifications and cleanup.
The “Stuff Page” has been updated with some new test equipment under the “Counters” section, and we’ve added some additional oddities that we’ve found during a cleanup of the office – this includes nixie tube clocks, and LED related items.
A new “Slide Rule” page has been added, and while we are still working on populating this page, we have added three rules that we are going to be offering a sale on during the next month! Don’t miss out on these good deals.
Newly added to the “Other Equipment” section of the Stuff Page is a Fairchild 6200-B Curve Tracer. It’s heavy!
We are also in the process of getting a number of Philips 6654C Programmable Counters tested and calibrated. Feel free to contact us if you are interested in reserving one of these units. We currently have six going for evaluation, and will post the final available stock count of this equipment once it returns from calibration.
Walter SHAWLEE II, 1949-2023 – Walter Shawlee II, as he said to tell the world, died with stunning inconvenience. More specifically, he passed away in Kelowna, BC, on September 4, 2023. Born in LA to Hollywood actress Joan Shawlee and artist Walter Shawlee, he is survived by his wife Susan, daughter Rosanne, son Walt, sister Angie, and niece Sydney.
Studying engineering at the University of California – Los Angeles, his life was filled with many adventures as an electronics engineer, teacher, entrepreneur, and slide rule aficionado. Long before he eventually settled in Kelowna, BC, Walter and Susan were married in Halmstad, Sweden. They would later immigrate to Canada, making multi-year pit stops in Vancouver and Prince George.
It was in Prince George in 1979 that Walter and Susan founded Northern Airborne Technology, an avionics and R&D company, which would later relocate to Kelowna. This was not without its difficulties, and Walter would be the first to sing the praise of every individual who ultimately made NAT successful. Avionics equipment that NAT produced for aircrafts is still flying today, and standards that Walter developed at NAT became global industry standards. Walter’s life spanned countries and businesses, and at each stage was deeply enriched by the incredible people who joined in his exploits.
After transitioning NAT to new owners, Walter founded Sphere Research Corporation, which set the course for 30 years of enthusiastic research and development, test equipment metrology, and slide rule preservation.
During his many years as a business leader, Walter dedicated himself to the development of future generations, chairing the BC Science Council, and mentoring young people on working in STEM fields as a teacher for OUC. His innovation, creativity, and charity have left a lasting mark on the world far beyond the borders of the city he settled in, and his work is still keeping the skies safe today.
Many thanks and much gratitude to the people who fearlessly participated in his hobbies and business escapades, and who were his comrades throughout. The Shawlee family extends their deep gratitude to all those people who supported Walter during his final days.
Important – Sphere Research will continue to remain open and will be conducting business, although we may be a bit slow in responding for the next week.
Sphere Research Corporation