[HBR] Projects

[hbr@mailman.qth.net]

In a message dated 10/13/02 5:36:48 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
wa5vgo@earthlink.net writes:

> It sure has been quiet lately. Does anyone out there have any projects 
going?

My main project for the past several months has been getting the 
bench/shop/shack back in order. Have way too much stuff, and deciding what 
goes and what stays is a big job. 

On the HBR side, there hangs a tale....

Back about 1973 or so I built several homebrew CW rxs around FT-241 xtals. 
One of them was traded to my brother, WA3UZI for something or other. He used 
it for quite a while and then left it in our parents' attic.

Fast forward about 25 years and both our parents are in the cemetery, and the 
old house is being cleaned out. Old rx is still in the attic, under a pile of 
dust from a reroof job of a decade ago. Brother doesn't want the rx, so I 
bring it home. After much self-debate I decide to tear it down for the few 
good parts it had. I have a newer version of that basic design that was much 
better. 

This rx had one very annoying design feature - the dial turned in the 
opposite direction as the knob. I had used the osc cap from a Command set tx, 
and machined a dial shaft extension onto the end with the worm gear. On the 
end of the dial shaft extension went a drum dial - made from a plastic cereal 
bowl that we had used as kids. Pilot lights inside the cereal bowl shine thru 
the translucent plastic and the dial is viewed thru a window in the front 
panel.

But the design of the gears in those caps is such that the cereal bowl turns 
the wrong way. Very annoying. BC-221 and LM caps don't have this problem, and 
the dial shaft is already there, so the later version rx uses a BC-221 cap.  

This rx was also set up with most of the tube heaters brought out to a long 
barrier strip on the back of the chassis. This permitted all sorts of odd 
tubes (5U8, 3CB6, 7AU7) to be used, by swapping jumpers 

What an odd job - dismantling a receiver I designed and built more than a 
quarter century ago. Most of the parts are still good, too. 

73 de Jim, N2EY