[HBR] Fw: Re: Fw: HBR-16

[N2EY at aol.com]

In a message dated 8/13/06 2:05:38 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
waltah at earthlink.net writes:


> Tim's thinking mirrors mine:
> > Labor value (condidering workmanship and knowledge etc.) in building a
> > HBR-16 from scratch is in the several thousand dollar range (assuming
> > you can get all the parts off-the-shelf and it can be assembled/
> > aligned in a 40 hour work week).  
> 

I third the motion. 

I spent about $10 cash to build the "silver receiver" pictured on the HBR 
website. Most of that was for crystals, 88 mH toroids, some hardware, and solder. 
Everything else (even hookup wire) was reused from Command sets, old TV and 
AM BC sets, and the kitchen. 

I don't know how many hours went into parts acquisition, cleanup, 
fabrication, etc. But it's safe to say that even at the minimum wage of those days I had 
a pretty expensive receiver!

OTOH, when you consider how much I learned from the experience, and how well 
the result worked....

Probably one of the biggest attractions of the HBR series *in its time* was 
the fact that parts acquisition time could be kept very low since all parts 
were catalog items. Yet most parts were common enough that a lot of hams would 
probably have many of them in the junkbox. 

The availability of drilling templates, detailed coil winding instructions 
and high quality photos made the HBRs even easier to duplicate.

73 de Jim, N2EY