Spares Sorting Tedium and Siamese Capacitors

One of the problems with obtaining spares and parts via the acquisition of surplus, is that often everything is all jumbled up together! And so at some point, either when space is running low or more normally when moaned at by the wife, I have to endure the tedium of sorting bags of mixed random parts out into their individual values or part numbers. First up, was an old ice cream box full of, mostly, semiconductors

 These turned out to be a very eclectic mix of transistors, diodes, a few power SCRs, and a good smattering of voltage regulators

 

Before moving onto the next bag, I put some time into the 40m Direct Conversion receiver Bob M1BBV has asked me to work on. This is something he picked up on ebay already 'built'. It was working to an extent, but had some construction problems

Ive sorted out the badly placed parts, dealt with the poor soldering, and fixed the bad connections. There may be an issue with the level of output power, but that can wait. It seems to give about 70kHz coverage, so Bobs asked me to put it down at the CW end of the band

Boxing it up proved a bit tricky as the Chinese design is not perfectly symmetrical about the tuning pot, so aligning the holes was a bit awkward. There was also the issue of the 'preset mod' that can be seen at the top of the picture, slightly off board. No one knew what this was! It turns out its to adjust the level of the sidetone volume!

But that was enough of that! Yesterday was extremely hot and sunny, so instead of radio or electronics, I spent most of the day gardening! But, when it was too hot, I sorted out a big bag of mixed capacitors!

 These were mostly quite vintage types! But they will be fine for non-critical applications. With so many to sort, it was still a surprise to come across a conjoined pair!

 Then, in the cool of evening, I returned to the workshop. Further work on the wiring of my Dew Heater Controller, now not too far from completion, plus the construction of a scaled down version of DL4YHF's CW Keyer, this time with no memory buttons, again for Bob

 Today is yet again Scorchio, and the workshop at present too hot to be comfortable working in.