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               West Essex Amateur Radio Club, Essex Fells, NJ

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Mike, WA2QIC's Ham Blog

Page 16

03-FEB-08: Continued.  RF MotherBoard Assembly

One thing has become clear by this weekend, my replacement parts requests to Elecraft apparently are not legit as far as Elecraft is concerned.  Elecraft Tech support has been stellar thus far, but I am disappointed that no one from their "parts support" area bothered to reply to my requests and tell me I was on my own for replacement parts at this stage. Keep in mind this is an old kit I am building.  Elecraft will supply parts to new kit buyers that find parts missing after inventorying the kit upon receipt.  In my case, this kit has been lying around for years, and has been half built for 14 months.  But, I am being ignored by the Elecraft parts people.  Getting a 'no' answer is perfectly ok, but not getting any answer at all is bad form.  Having to buy these misc. missing or broken parts myself is no big deal.  Being able to buy them from Elecraft guarantees that I get the correct replacement parts.   This has not been a problem except for the toriod core I broke earlier.  I can't find the core in the Mauser catalog to save my kit.  So, I sent an email to Mauser asking for assistance.  If not, there is another supplier I found on-line (Ken's Electronics) which sells the core, but they require a minimum order and all that.  Let's see what Mausers has to say first.

On with the kit... I installed the crystals and grounded the cans per instructions.  I used a pair of fine wire cutters to hold the wire in place while I soldered it to the top of the can.  Then I soldered the ground wire to the PCB pad.  This worked fine.  For the five crystals that required grounding to the side of the can, I soldered these ground wires to the PCB first, then pressed the wire to the side of the can, soldering it.  The instructions caution that the cans are very sensitive to heat.  I did the best I could to solder quickly.  We will soon know if I was successfull or not.

Here are three pics of the installed crystals.

   

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