Some Heath comments

[William Lockwood]

Terry, I did exactly that with a GR-91 receiver. Unsoldered all the
components cleaned them up laid them aside. Purchased all new resistors,
capacitors, nuts, bolts lock washers and new tubes.
After all components were to hand I proceeded to build the kit following
each step as  called for in the manual. I was interested in your comment
about the chasis being cadmium plated. I had been wondering what the plating
was. I have a GC-1A Mohican which will receive the same treatment. On this
project, however, the chassis will get replated as it is covered with finger
and handprints which have etched away the plating. I was always under the
impression that the plating was tin. The fasteners Heath used were tin
plated and almost impossible to come by. The popular plating for nuts and
bolts these days seems to be zink. The food industry in the past used tin
plating but have now switched to stainless steel.
The first thing I do when I purchase a used Heathkit is open it up and
decide if its a candidate for rebuilding. So far most of them are. I'll be
building Heathkits until I'm too old to hold a soldering iron or until they
ban solder as being too hazardous to our health. I have about ten kits at
this point which need rebuilding.

The thing that interferes more than anything with my rebuilding efforts is
the thing this message is composed on.

Regards, Bill







At 08:13 PM 3/12/98 -0800, you wrote:
>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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