[Boatanchors] A Classic Example of the Homebrew Art

[Rob Atkinson]

That's a beautiful piece of work but remember that for QST, most of
the time authors submitted their text and schematics, and the
professional shop techs and machinists at ARRL built the piece of gear
that readers saw in QST photos.  That's why all the homebrew in QST
was always perfect looking.   It was the ham equivalent of these House
Beautiful magazines that show these gorgeous interiors that look like
no one has ever lived in them.

When I was a new ham in high school I knew none of this and since the
QST staff never widely admitted the article gear was built by them in
a well equipped machine shop, that meant that for me, homebrew was
this impossibly high bar as I naively thought ALL those projects were
built by the authors, therefore all ham homebrew looked perfect and if
you were going to build something and you couldn't turn out a
perfectly laid out and punched chassis and front panel, then forget
about it.

It wasn't until years later as an adult that I started throwing parts
together and getting stuff to work and the hell with how it looks.

I  wonder how many hams never tried to build anything because they
never thought they could achieve the QST build quality.

73

Rob
K5UJ

On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 2:21 PM Al Klase <ark at ar88.net> wrote:
>
> Gang,
>
> I've been obsessing over an artifact from 1951 QST, *Take a look*
> <http://www.skywaves.ar88.net/homebrew/Homebrew_Projects.htm>.
>
> Al
>
> --
> Al Klase – N3FRQ
> Jersey City, NJ
> http://www.skywaves.ar88.net/
>