[Elecraft] Inventory

[Paul Williamson]

>I won't get very far tonite with my inventory but I'm wondering, 
>whats the easiest way to do it? What worked for you?

I had lots of room on the table and no other pests in the house (four 
legged or two legged) so I printed out the inventory tables for each 
assembly phase from the downloaded manual, spread them around on the 
table, and laid out each part on the line where it's listed. There 
isn't quite enough room for all the capacitors to be unambiguously 
placed this way, but it's close enough that you can identify which 
parts are missing (one small capacitor in my case) quickly enough, 
and it's really quite easy to grab each part as you need it.

Some of the caps are in separate bags by value. I left these in the 
bag, just marking the value on the outside of the bag. I also left 
the ICs and other semiconductors in the conductive foam, of course, 
and various other items were more conveniently handled separately. 
These items I just checked off on the parts list pages.

The mechanical parts are all mixed up and not separated by assembly 
phase like the electronic parts. These I just dumped onto a cookie 
sheet (the kind with side walls) and then separated by part type. 
It's really only necessary to separate them enough to be sure you 
know which kind of machine screw is which. The rest of the parts are 
either all identical (lockwashers, nuts) or easy to identify uniquely.

Confession being good for the soul, I will admit that despite this 
elaborate scheme I ended up misidentifying a couple of capacitors and 
soldering them into the wrong holes. Nothing a little solder-wick 
couldn't cure. These caps were not labeled exactly the way they were 
described in the parts list, but I should still have known better.

73  -Paul
kb5mu@amsat.org