A Dark Spectre from My Past; "Hobbies Weekly"

[Panrock]

I remember building a (PW?) "Elegant Seven" radio kit when I was at school in the 1960s. I came unstuck when it specified that I needed a signal generator to align the IFs. Since I hadn't an inkling of what an intermediate frequency or a signal generator was, the project was abandoned. A lot of pocket money wasted!

Steve

[Radio Wrangler]

Yeah, so it wasn't just me who found a Skyrover completely inoperative!

I feel so much better now!

David

[Bazz4CQJ]

As kids, something that both my best friend and I would do was this;

1. "fall in love" with a project in PW or whatever other mag and decide to build it
2. Start buying the key bits immediately, but one at a time, since funds were mainly related to pocket money installments
3. After buying several expensive bits, lose interest, moving on to our next "project of infatuation"

40+ years on, both of us can still find un-used bits of treasure in our junk collections which probably cost several weeks spending money way back. Tell me that we were not the only ones to do this .

[Tim]

We all built things which refused to work as kids. There's no shame in that. I still manage to do it now, and I'm 57.

I have built several crystal sets over the years, none of which have worked, and about a dozen projects from ETI and Hobby electronics in my youth. I can only remember about two actually working. Some of the old radio repair books suggest a croc clip or small pliers held shut with a rubber band to act as a heatsink while soldering in the early transistors.

[robjkmannering]

Took me months of snipping out germanium diodes from duff transistor sets at the age of seven before realising that the inabillity to receive anything from my crystal set lay in a poor aerial.
Once I had discovered the dial stop on the telephone, I was away! My parents were not so keen to have me crouching by the receiver with a crysal earpiece in one ear every time they wanted to make a call...

Rob

[Herald1360]

Originally Posted by merlinmaxwell

as would lard!

At least lard might stop the decent mechanical joint from corroding!

I too remember the Woolworths stuff but ISTR reading it wasn't suitable for electrical joints before it claimed any pocket money. I persevered with Dad's old 100W (?) Solon and an old reel of 16gauge "NOKORODE" or some such name rosin cored solder.

At some point I built a couple of Roamer 7 sets (horrible misleadingly advertised things) and then an Elegant 7 which worked OK but needed a separate aerial trimmer for years until I finally learnt how to track it up properly.

[Andrew2]

You are not alome, Bazz4. In the early 60's I mastered the art of making crystal sets and decided to move on to a single transistor circuit. Would it work - not a jot! Several times I tried, first with those 'Bi-Pak' surplus transistors, then with genuine OC44's etc but no joy.
One of them did produce some very weak audio, but it did this regardless of whether the battery was connected!

Finally one of them worked, and after that they all worked! My masterpiece was a 3 transistor set which used an AF115 RF amplifier with a reaction coil on the ferrite rod, followed by two stages of audio. Careful setting-up could drag in Radio Caroline, no mean feat here in Manchester.
Has anyone else had the same experience ie struggle for ages and can't see what you are doing wrong. Then - for apparently no reason - one works and from that moment all future designs also work?

Wrangler, I too had a Trionic kit and I only ever built the radios! All the other stuff - alarms, light flashers etc didn't interest me. Mine must have been a later one than yours, as inside the domes were AF115's.

[Alan Stepney]

Reading all the problems people had with early transistors and sets, just makes me thankful that I started with valves.

At least they WOULD work, and the few (many?) shocks you got made you more careful in the future.

[Radio Wrangler]

Well, after the skyrover transistor kit debacle, I did go back to valves. 14 of them!

David

[Nicko]

Originally Posted by Bazz4CQJ

As kids, something that both my best friend and I would do was this;

1. "fall in love" with a project in PW or whatever other mag and decide to build it
2. Start buying the key bits immediately, but one at a time, since funds were mainly related to pocket money installments
3. After buying several expensive bits, lose interest, moving on to our next "project of infatuation"

40+ years on, both of us can still find un-used bits of treasure in our junk collections which probably cost several weeks spending money way back. Tell me that we were not the only ones to do this .

Sigh. Me too.

I fell in love with the Practical Electronics "War Games Computer" (1971, September edition). Had a Ledex switch, a telephone dial for data entry, all sorts off stuff...

Got a loan of 20 quid from my parents but I never finished it... Learnt a good lesson though...

"Try not to have more than 15 unfinished major projects on the go at any one time"...

Still trying to enforce that one...