Good craftsmanship is something to be proud of and is becoming more rare
in
these cost-cutting, anything to make a buck, times.
I salute your efforts to reuse the Super-Heavy-Duty Made-In-USA terminal
lugs!
Kent/KA5MIR
Whenever I part out an old piece of equipment, I always save all the
hardware, down to the last screw, nut and washer. I have a fairly large
box filled with misc hardware, and some specific boxes of sorted nuts/screws
by size, and boxes of other sorted stuff. Even if the piece is totally junk
and none of the parts are worth keeping, I save any screws and other
hardware I can get loose from it. I now have a separate box for metric
"Japanese screws" that I salvage from any modern consumer electronics junk
before I toss it out. These are beginning to come in handy now.
I usually dump the entire box into a large sorting tray (a 2' X 4' X 1"
metal, heavy gauge food tray, salvaged from the dump - looks like something
out of a large restaurant kitchen or army mess hall). With the pile spread
out, I can usually spot the exact piece I want, then return the rest back to
the storage box. It's nice, when restoring a piece of vintage gear, to have
on hand exact replacement hardware. The wrong style or size screw head or
nut stands out like a sore thumb.
If I have to use a modern terminal lug in older gear, I cut away the yellow,
red or blue plastic sleeve and solder the lug into place. That at least
looks a little closer to the original. Some of my restorations are w.i.p.
I continue to run across exact replacement components and hardware, so I
pull out the modern or mismatched replacement and install the original.
Same with my homebrew transmitters. I constantly have my eye out for
top-of-the-line-in-its-day components to replace any el cheapo "ham radio
quality" components such as audio transformers and other components and
hardware. If I find them, after testing them to make sure they work, I swap
out the lower quality component.
The process is almost complete in my HF-300 transmitter. That transmitter,
almost completely built from pre-ww2 stuff, would have been unaffordable to
nearly any ham back in that era. I once estimated, based on the prices I
could find listed in old catalogues, that the rig would have cost the
equivalent of more than $20,000 in to-day's dollarettes. But over the past
36 years since I first built it, I might have a total of about $500 (rough
guess) in it, since it is constructed almost entirely of stuff someone else
didn't want any more and considered "worthless".
Don k4kyv
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