30-12-2019, 02:25 PM
Lack of elecktrickery isn't a valid excuse!
True, we did have it in the house I grew up in - one 5A 2pin socket in the living room! We also had electric light in the two main rooms downstairs, the hall and landing and a lamp over the bed in the master bedroom but everywhere else was gas lit - including the kitchen.
When I was about 12 or so I succeeded in drilling a hole in the plasterboard wall behind the switch over my mum's bed and though the other plasterboard wall so that I could poke the end of a length of VIR cable that I found somewhere through the wall and run it round my bedroom to a light I screwed to the wall over my bed and a 5A 2pin socket behind the bed!
Someone gave me a prewar Cossor radio which performed very well and sat conveniently beside my bed for years!
My brother, 4 years my junior, had a smaller room in the rear extension over the kitchen and when I started listening to the Cossor, he wanted a radio too!
There was no way my mother would have allowed me to pull up floorboards to get a cable into the room so anything in there would have to be battery operated, so mum asked me if I could build something for his birthday present.
Mum was bringing us both up on a Widowed Mother's Pension, so money was tight which meant that economy was the order of the day!
Someone had given me a chassis which had never been used but was pre-drilled with holes for octal valve holders, IFTs and so on, so I used that. The obvious thing to build was a one valve TRF, so I would need an octal valve.
Careful scrutiny of the ads in PW and my valve data book yielded a 1N5GT at a reasonable price. I'd found a book in the library with several suitable circuits but the one that caught my eye used a pot for reaction rather than the usual solid dielectric capacitor. I didn't have the cap but I did have a suitable pot and it even had a DP Switch! A scrap chassis yielded a twin gang tuning cap that conveniently matched holes on the chassis, so that sorted that out and there was even a slow motion drive to go with it!
A Repanco DRR2 was used for the coil. Add a Yaxley switch for wave-change and all I had to do was put it all together - but there was still one problem. High impedance headphones were very expensive - considerable more that the total cost of all the other parts. But this was still in the heyday of Government surplus, and Duke's in Manor Park advertised single low impedance earphones very cheaply in PW. My scrap chassis still had its output transformer. How well would it work with a 60Ω earphone rather than a 3Ω speaker? There was only one way to find out!
It wasn't much of a detour on my way home from school to visit Duke's, so off I went and also took the opportunity to browse the rest of his stuff.
All of the electronic part of the construction took place in the kitchen beside the gas cooker, because that is where I heated up my trusty soldering iron - 1/9d from Woolworths!
When it was finally finished it was time for the acid test. I switched it on and Wow! - I couldn't believe the sensitivity and selectivity! It served my brother well!
True, we did have it in the house I grew up in - one 5A 2pin socket in the living room! We also had electric light in the two main rooms downstairs, the hall and landing and a lamp over the bed in the master bedroom but everywhere else was gas lit - including the kitchen.
When I was about 12 or so I succeeded in drilling a hole in the plasterboard wall behind the switch over my mum's bed and though the other plasterboard wall so that I could poke the end of a length of VIR cable that I found somewhere through the wall and run it round my bedroom to a light I screwed to the wall over my bed and a 5A 2pin socket behind the bed!
Someone gave me a prewar Cossor radio which performed very well and sat conveniently beside my bed for years!
My brother, 4 years my junior, had a smaller room in the rear extension over the kitchen and when I started listening to the Cossor, he wanted a radio too!
There was no way my mother would have allowed me to pull up floorboards to get a cable into the room so anything in there would have to be battery operated, so mum asked me if I could build something for his birthday present.
Mum was bringing us both up on a Widowed Mother's Pension, so money was tight which meant that economy was the order of the day!
Someone had given me a chassis which had never been used but was pre-drilled with holes for octal valve holders, IFTs and so on, so I used that. The obvious thing to build was a one valve TRF, so I would need an octal valve.
Careful scrutiny of the ads in PW and my valve data book yielded a 1N5GT at a reasonable price. I'd found a book in the library with several suitable circuits but the one that caught my eye used a pot for reaction rather than the usual solid dielectric capacitor. I didn't have the cap but I did have a suitable pot and it even had a DP Switch! A scrap chassis yielded a twin gang tuning cap that conveniently matched holes on the chassis, so that sorted that out and there was even a slow motion drive to go with it!
A Repanco DRR2 was used for the coil. Add a Yaxley switch for wave-change and all I had to do was put it all together - but there was still one problem. High impedance headphones were very expensive - considerable more that the total cost of all the other parts. But this was still in the heyday of Government surplus, and Duke's in Manor Park advertised single low impedance earphones very cheaply in PW. My scrap chassis still had its output transformer. How well would it work with a 60Ω earphone rather than a 3Ω speaker? There was only one way to find out!
It wasn't much of a detour on my way home from school to visit Duke's, so off I went and also took the opportunity to browse the rest of his stuff.
All of the electronic part of the construction took place in the kitchen beside the gas cooker, because that is where I heated up my trusty soldering iron - 1/9d from Woolworths!
When it was finally finished it was time for the acid test. I switched it on and Wow! - I couldn't believe the sensitivity and selectivity! It served my brother well!
