Hi Everyone. New Member here.
I found your group through video's on your you tube chanell. A little about myself.
As a young boy, growing up in the 1970's (yes I am that old). My father purchased an experiment kit from heathkit for me. You know one of those ones with all the springs for connctors, a hand full of components. I forget how many experiments it had something along the line of 101 as I recall. At the same time my father had ordered a kit for himself, not his first but the first one I was old enough to be interested in helping him with. After putting my experimenter together, my father and I started working on his kit, a multi-meter. He taught me to check all the parts off in the assembly manual, as I unpacked the package for him. After I checked off the parts, he would sort them into a cardboard box that he had cut the sides off of, at an angle downward from the back to the front. He taught me to sort all the resistors, and other components and place them in the holes the corrugation created (if they fit and would stay, if not he had an old cupcake tin in the bottom of the box that he put them in). After sorting them we worked through the instructions together, me reading them to him, him placing the components, double checking himself, then soldering them. He even let me solder a few, teaching me the basic techniques. After assembly, was complete we went throught the testing/trouble shooting steps. This proved to be a great learning experience, and motivated me to work throught the experiments in my experimenters kit. I was hooked.
A year or so later, I was bored durring the summer break from school. I think I was about 12. Walked to where my dad worked and talked him into taking me to lunch. At lunch, he asked if I had finished what ever chore he had asked me to do. When I said yes, he told me he had gotten a new kit from heathkit and asked if I wanted to sort the parts out like he had showed me before. I said sure, what is it? A tachometer for my model airplane engines. I probably ran home. Couldn't wait to pull out the heathkit project box and get started. Well, there weren't too many parts in this kit, and it didn't take me long to check them off and sort them. So I read the instructions through. Now is when it gets interesting, cause I decided heck I can build this. Plugged in the soldering iron and started with step 1. Checking them off one by one as I went through each step, carefully assembling, double checking and soldering. Low and behold, I get to the final testing step, which was to use an incandescent light to test that it correctly read (I remember at the time not really understaning AC and Cycles per second, so not really understanding why pointing it at an incandescent bulb worked for calibrating it.) But the beuty of heathkit was the instructions. You just had to do what they said, understand it later. It worked just fine after a little tweak of the adjustment screw on the analog meter. At dinner, dad asked if I had sorted the parts out, yes sir I proudly said. Good, after dinner we will go assemble it. No need to I explained, it is assembled, calibrated and tested per the instructions. So I guess all we really need to do is fire up one of your model airplane motors and test it against that.
This is getting kind of long. So I am going to sign off for now. Looking forward to learning more about you people and maybe gain some knowledge.
Till Later
Charlie
