[Boatanchors] "Oldtimer bitching"? Or Timely Warning? You Decide.

[Donald Chester]

Bill N4LG wrote:

>  A common idea that we hams seem to have acquired
is that buying old boatanchors and parts are a good investment.

It comes from the frenzy feeding on e-Bay and the
Japanese buying spree of the past ten years. But,
the simple truth is that the supply of this old
junk is exceeding demand, and the prices are
falling short - whether we like it or not. If one
invested heavily in boatanchors expecting
financial performance like a mutual fund, or even
>  a CD, they are going to go broke from falling prices and inflation.

It depends on what kind of 'boatanchors' you have in mind.  Some have had the idea that anything 'vintage', heavy, uses tube type circuitry or that happened to be hot items the year when when they first became licensed, is worth its weight in gold.  This has been evident at places like Dayton for the past couple of decades, in the prices vendors have been asking for this equipment.  Same with parts.  Transmitting tubes, transmitting variables, edge-wound coils, rotary inductors often have price tags that, even corrected for inflation, still rival what it cost new.  I think that's changing now; I am seeing more and more of this stuff still sitting un-sold on hamfest tables at the end of the day, and asking prices are beginning to come down, sometimes big-time.

About the only things I consider even might be valuable enough to drag home these are well-built pre WWII and pre-1950 homebrew and commercially built items, and top-of-the-line items of any vintage. I rarely pick up things like complete transmitters, receivers and similar items, but I keep a look-out for specific transformers, tubes, capacitors, meters, etc.  Some are really speciality items such as a name-plate, meter, knob or other component of a certain  specific style to  replace a missing one on something I already have, to complete a restoration or to finish a homebrew replica of a 1930s something that has become an object of my obsession.  I couldn't care less about all the mint condx DX-100s, Viking IIs, Super-Pros, GK500s, SX-whatevers I see in passing.  I always grab stuff like boxes full of wire-wound resistors, mica  capacitors, carbon composition resistors, if they go for a few bucks. Only if I  see a specific item that I know I need,  will I dig through those boxes and pick out a single item and pay a premium for it.

I did pick up another 75A-4 at Dayton this year;  the guy originally wanted $425 for it; he said it  didn't work but it looked clean and in better condition than any of mine. There was no filter, but he said he had the SSB filter but didn't put it in the receiver out of fear that  someone would rip it off. At the end of the day, he had it marked down to $340.  It still didn't have the filter, and he said he discovered he had forgot to bring it, so he was selling at reduced price.  A while later I walked by and it was still there.  I offered him $300 even, and he accepted my bid.  It is in overall better condition than mine at home, but some Hammy Hambone had dicked around with the wiring, and no wonder it didn't work; he had disconnected the wire lead that carries RF from the PTO to the second mixer.  It took me a few hours to correct a few major botches in the wiring, and it now works, but still needs alignment and some minor troubleshooting.

In other words, I only seek out rare or top-shelf stuff, and like to dig through the boxes under the tables where I occasionally find treasures like UTC LS- transformers and tubes whose prices are normally driven sky-high by audiophools, like 211s and 2A3s (both of which I use in my transmitter).  I pass up loads of stuff that I once would have gone ape-faeces over, but now I just look it and think, "I already have two or three at home, so what do I need with a fourth?".  Of course I would grab a ridiculous bargain whether I needed it or not, like a $10 Collins AM mechanical filter, but those kinds of bargains have become increasingly rare at hamfests. 

Some of the stuff I run across is esoteric enough that most buyers and sellers wouldn't know what it was, and can be had for almost nothing. One good example is those little EF Johnson clips that slip over turns of edge-wound coils.  They sold for 35¢ each in the 1950 EFJ catalogue but now, newly-manufactured ones go for as much as $20 each; Rip-off Sales of Nebraska had used ones a few years ago at the bargain price of $10 each.  A couple of years ago I found a banged-up, corroded edge-wound coil that had a dozen of those clips attached; the guy wanted $8 bucks for it and wouldn't take any less, so I gladly shelled it out. I took it home, removed the clips, cleaned them up and tossed the rest of the coil in my junkbox.


Rob K5UJ wrote:

> Bill, I've had backwave years ago but I don't remember what I did
about it.  I think it is not difficult to remedy but I'd have to
consult a handbook.  You must have the driver free running and are
only keying the final?  Maybe the VFO or some intermediate stage is
driving harder than it needs to be?  If it can be heard by skywave it
> is too strong alright.

I  had a backwave problem when I first built my HF-300 rig.  Turned out to be feed-through in the cathode-keyed buffer stage between the xtal oscillator/VFO amplifier which runs all the time, and the type 211 stage that drives the final.  I tried both a type 807 and type 802 tube, with the same result.  My fix was to neutralise the stage, using a balanced, link-coupled  plate tank for that stage, and a homebrew neutralising capacitor made with a couple of pieces of #14 wire and little tabs of copper sheet, each about 1/2" × 1/2", adjustable by bending one of the pieces of wire. I ended up using the 802 pentode, which was less squirrelly and tuned more smoothly than the 807 beam tetrode.  RCA claims that if shielded well enough both those tubes don't need neutralisation, but whatever was causing the feed-through in mine was neutralised completely on every band I ever used the transmitter on, 20 through 160.


Don k4kyv