Top Gun

Talor Engineering

kid drawing against a manikin

This is Top Gun. This is a quick draw simulation, using a life sized manikin. His name is Rusty, or so says his belt buckle.

I designed and built a new photo cell detector for his chest as the original photo cell was no longer available. I also needed to find a new tape head as one channel was bad. I also needed to take the Fidelipak audio cartridge and reproduce it.

We removed an original tape from the cartridge and wound it on a reel-to-reel deck. The deck played the tape out to a Macintosh 8500 which has CD quality digital inputs. Since one channel of the tape was not aligned correctly for a reel-to-reel set up, the tape head was misaligned to record the second channel and then my wife combined the two channels and synchronized the audio. Finally the sound was archived on a CD.

New endless loop tape was purchased and the Macintosh played back the tape onto the reel-to-reel.

Some restoration of the shot clock and the arm was also required to get Rusty drawing correctly.