[Elecraft] DL1 Building a success, Soldering Iron Runaway

[John Huggins]

My kid and I just finished off the DL1 Dummy Load.

Simple? Yes, but it introduced quite nicely some basic soldering skills 
for the 12 year old.

Also, it demonstrated one key requirement in kit building... Read the 
text of a particular step in its entirety. I let him read the steps and 
when we got to the one commanding "Install the 100Ω Resistors" he did 
not read the rest of the step suggesting to install them 1/16 inch above 
the board. Luckily being a circuit designer EE I figured elevating them 
made sense so we did, but if we had simply read the whole step we would 
not have had to guess.

So hats off to Elecraft for producing good step by step documentation.

Oh I also bought some new tips and shroud for my old Weller EC2001 
Soldering Station. I had not used this in many years. We installed a new 
tip and shroud, turned it on and moved to doing the parts inventory. I 
looked up to see the tip red hot. Hmmm... I twiddled with the five pin 
connection between the iron and the base unit and it calmed down. All 
the while the temperature seemed to display what looked like a valid 
varying value around 700°F while it was clearly much higher. I don't 
know what happened, but I wanted to share the warning to visually verify 
your iron has not gone into heating runaway. I have heard folks say the 
five pin hand piece connector can be a little flaky. I guess this is why 
so many of you like the Weller with the ferromagnetic tips eh?

On to the XG2 Receiver Test Oscillator...

John