The case of the mystery transformer

Replacing a part manufactured by a company that has drifted off to the sweet by and by may require a bit of detective work.

What happens when a device or component that had been integral to a design is no longer manufactured or, even worse, the company that made it no longer exists? A recent call from one of our readers had me asking this exact question.

The caller was in a bit of quandry. He needed to replace an isolation transformer—somewhat of a custom part no less—manufactured years ago by a company called United Transformer Company (UTC). Sounds easy enough, right?

Well, it gets a bit dicey. UTC seems to have “disappeared,” he said. Online searches for information about the company and parent TRW had come up empty. So he turned to me, the passive components editor at Electronic Products . My investigative journalist instincts immediately got the best of me, and I promised I’d get on the case.

After a few hours of Googling, I stumbled across an obituary in The New York Times for UTC’s founder, Samuel Baraf. The article had some interesting tidbits about the fate of UTC: after founding the company in 1932, Baraf sold it to TRW, Inc. in 1966.

Sometime after that, UTC was sold to OPT Industries—a subsidiary of magnetics stalwart Torotel—which seems to have been sold in the late 1990s. For me, the trail ended here.

I handed the investigation over to my “client,” who was pleased with what I had found and who has promised to keep me informed. But the effort I had expended on his behalf started me thinking: What would I do if I had to deal with this on a regular basis? I’m sure some of you readers are presented with such challenges quite often.

Of course, it’s not always this difficult. Most of the time, you just get a new part that is capable of performing like the old part, and then hope it plays nice-nice in the design. But I gather there are times, and such is the case here, when a replacement just isn’t readily available, or the man-hours required to track down something similar just aren’t worth it.

Certainly, the task has been made easier, with all the information available at a mouse click. But it still seems like a big pain, especially if you’re supposed to be designing cool circuits.

And, we’re assuming that we can identify the part at all. Sometimes, an EE isn’t so lucky.

Well, one thing that we can count on is that technology will continue to speed forward without regard for the past, leaving the engineer to play Sherlock Holmesor was that Inspector Clouseau? Happy hunting…

Ralph Raiola