Some Heath comments

[Terry Perdue]

Just some pointless rambling from a fellow Heathen...

Like so many others, I recently caught the bug to put together a classic
Heath station, similar to what I started out with as a teenager in the
early 60s. Everyone will agree that their first choice would be to find
unassembled kits and recapture that part of the experience as well, but
there's not much chance of that anymore. I located a DX-60, AR-3 and QF-1
on the Internet, and took a chance that they were in decent condition.
Fortunately, the outward appearance was quite good, in fact the QF-1 looked
mint. But the assembly job left a lot to be desired. That's not to be
unkind to the builders - the early kits required some manual gymnastics to
get into some of the tight spots with soldering iron and needle-nosed
pliers, and inexperienced builders can't be expected to do a perfect job of
soldering. In addition, the cad-plated chassis and hardware gets to looking
pretty cruddy after a few decades. So I decided to turn them back into kits
again. It took a couple evenings to take the DX-60 apart, suck the solder
from all the tube sockets, switch lugs, etc, and a couple weeks to locate
new hardware, replacements for some of the electrolytics and for the disk
caps and resistors that didn't survive. I was surprised how easy it was to
lace up a new wiring harness after making measurements on the old one. I
also cleaned up the sheet metal parts with fine steel wool, and applied car
wax to protect them against further rusting. (I think Krylon spray might
have been a better choice.) Before long, it was time to start building. It
wasn't as much fun as unpacking a virgin kit, but it did take me back to
the good old days. The finished transmitter probably doesn't work any
better than it did when I received it, but I feel more pride and confidence
using it. (The AR-3 was next, and took less than a week.) I'd be interested
in knowing how many others have gone this far to restore a vintage
Heathkit?

My next project is to build a QM-1 Q Meter, only this one was still
new-in-the-box. The chassis parts are badly corroded, the contacts on many
of the parts don't look like they'll take solder, and the entire assembly
section is a third of a page long. It basically says, Shorten leads as
necessary, use spaghetti where required, assemble the sub-chassis
separately, then attach them to each other and complete the wiring. Not a
single step to check off! Heath must have expected builders to have more
home-brew experience in those days!

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