[ARC5] a crying shame?

[Bill Cromwell]

On 03/17/2014 11:25 PM, john rose wrote:
> The buyer of this item may be disappointed. This radio is certainly not new and/or unused. I wrote the seller advising him he was wrong, but……  Fraud?
>
>
> eBay item number:
> 201051593929
> ______________________________________________________________
>
Hi,

I don't see any fraud there. It's described as some old junk and the 
starting bid is one penny. It's not possible to have an opening bid any 
lower than that. How could anybody with enough intelligence to plug in a 
computer and get on the internet read what he says about the radio and 
look at the pictures come to the conclusion the he is bidding on a brand 
new KX3!? Or even a 'new-in-the-box' command receiver?

Making anything of that radio is going to take a bag of parts in 
addition to what is already there. Inexpensive parts. The big cost is 
going to be elbow grease and lots of hands-on work. For some of us, the 
more time we get to mess with it the better. It's not going to be a 
gold-plate, rare, mint, collector quality, museum piece. Those are being 
displayed in museums right now. And the opening bid was surely more than 
on cent. If I win with my bid the radio will eventually be back on the 
air on 160 meters.

I don't want to rouse anybody into a bidding war <evil grin> so I'll 
point out that all of those caps and most of those resistors will have 
to be replaced. Eeeew. Work. Time. Not authentic. It'll need sheet metal 
work. Eeeew! more work. And paint! Even more work and um... smelly, too. 
Whoa! There is a tube missing! And the BFO can? And the audio 
transformer. Looks like a replacement for that dangling on the back 
porch! Everybody knows that spider webs come from...spiders! Yikes! 
Those communist troops I saw in the 60s were bad enough but - spiders?

A little bit of humor aside, some of us are makers and rebuilders (or 
aspiring makers and rebuilders) and see things like that radio as the 
beginnings of another project.

73,

Bill  KU8H