Rainy Day Projects (Ref. Mike's note)[via LSMTP - see www.lsoft.com]

[Howard Glueck]

Mike,

RAIN???  What is that?  We don't have rainy days this part of the year in
Texas unless we get a hurricane from Gulf of Mexico!  Guess Ohio has a few
rainy days now and again...

In 2-3 cases, I have seen same thing with Heathkits I bought used.  One
was a FM Deviation meter which I bought several years ago quite cheap in
San Antonio Swapfest.  It was all there, including Manual, but the
fellow said it was from a friend who said it had never worked very well
at all.  I knew that it was supposed to work reasonably well because a
friend had one, and his seemed reasonably accurate.  I bought it, took it
home and took a look inside.  I seem to remember finding a couple of
poor solder joints but worst problem was that someone had swapped a 2.2
and a 22 K resistor (or something like those values; easy to mix up).
Fixed that, replaced the frequency set trimmer, which had been mangled
at some point, and it works great!

Another case comes to mind in a capacitor checker/bridge (like C-3 or
so) where one of the transformer HV leads was put on wrong pin of the
rectifier tube.  Soldering was fine in this unit!  The thing had
"operated" for many years on half wave rectifier resulting in low
voltage, dim eye tube, and incorrect (probably ripply) voltage tests for
leakage.  Fellow selling it said it worked, but probably needed new eye
tube because it had turned kinda dim on him!

Guess that says that one should never assume that a part has failed
until you look for something obviously wrong.  I also bought a fairly
new HP RF signal generator which had very intermittent output
(advertised as either full signal or nothing) which probably had never
worked well.  Unit was a few years old, in reasonably good physical
condition, and had several repair tags on it - one from HP, a couple
from military, and one from calibration lab.  Final note indicated
faulty controller module, a proprietary part.  Price was right so I took
a chance.  Turned out to be a faulty crimp in an AMP or BERG connector
providing power distribution as well as damaged relay contacts.  Doubt
that relay contacts were initially bad, and bet someone helped that
along.

Oh well, interesting anyway.  One needs to check everything!

Howard Glueck / K5ZUA

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