[AMRadio] RAH RAH RA1000

[D. Chester]

>  Good craftsmanship is something to be proud of and is becoming more rare 
> in
> these cost-cutting, anything to make a buck, times.
>
>  I salute your efforts to reuse the Super-Heavy-Duty Made-In-USA terminal
> lugs!
> Kent/KA5MIR

Whenever I part out an old piece of equipment, I always save all the 
hardware, down to the last screw, nut and washer.  I have a fairly  large 
box filled with misc hardware, and some specific boxes of sorted nuts/screws 
by size, and boxes of other sorted stuff.  Even if the piece is totally junk 
and none of the parts are worth keeping, I save any screws and other 
hardware I  can get loose from it.  I now have a separate box for metric 
"Japanese screws" that I salvage from any modern consumer electronics junk 
before I toss it out.  These are beginning to come in handy now.

I usually dump the entire box into a large sorting tray (a 2' X 4' X 1" 
metal, heavy gauge food tray, salvaged from the dump - looks like something 
out of a large restaurant kitchen or army mess hall).  With the pile spread 
out, I can usually spot the exact piece I want, then return the rest back to 
the storage box.  It's nice, when restoring a piece of vintage gear, to have 
on hand exact replacement hardware.  The wrong style or size screw head or 
nut stands out like a sore thumb.

If I have to use a modern terminal lug in older gear, I cut away the yellow, 
red or blue plastic sleeve and solder the lug into place.  That at least 
looks a little closer to the original.  Some of my restorations are w.i.p. 
I continue to run across exact replacement components and hardware, so I 
pull out the modern or mismatched replacement and install the original. 
Same with my homebrew transmitters.  I constantly have my eye out for 
top-of-the-line-in-its-day components to replace any el cheapo "ham radio 
quality" components such as audio transformers and other components and 
hardware.  If I find them, after testing them to make sure they work, I swap 
out the lower quality component.

The process is almost complete in my HF-300 transmitter.  That transmitter, 
almost completely built from pre-ww2 stuff, would have been unaffordable to 
nearly any ham back in that era.  I once estimated, based on the prices I 
could find listed in old catalogues, that the rig would have cost the 
equivalent of more than $20,000 in to-day's dollarettes.  But over the past 
36 years since I first built it, I might have a total of about $500 (rough 
guess) in it, since it is constructed almost entirely of stuff someone else 
didn't want any more and considered "worthless".

Don k4kyv