Yaesu FT290r - and repair of

Victor wrote:

Hi Bob,

Good to see you still about, haven't seen you on the forum for a little while. Hope all's well your way.

Thanks, very much appreciated. You know things are going well when an old man starts 'giggling like a girly', just an overwhelming feeling of excitement!

Nice to have the old girl in use.  


All the best,
Victor

I'm still around, but i mostly read if and when I have time.  Not always logged in either, depends what I am using.  Just so many things to try to cram into a every shortening day (it appears, must be an age thing!) but I am still around.

I will be on the air on 27th June from 8am onwards channel 8 EU channels just to see if I can hear anything during the day Mark 26CT2036.  I think it is SSB he will be using.  No chance of direct contact, but might get a bit of a lift on, we'll see.

Anyway, nice to see some of these older Amateur sets are getting repaired and getting used.

Since it was mentioned, yeah I'm sure getting hold of some of the other intermediate FT's to add 6 & 10 & 70 would be nice, and one of that later ones (can't recall which, but it was pre 817 era) would be the natural next, unless you're wanting a full H/V/U true QRP portable in which case seeking an 817 in need of repair would be the next move to refurbish, but it's a vastly different animal complexity wise to work on, and as Victor discovered as the other FT owners did and quite a few techs, whilst it's not quite brain surgery on the later FTs - it's old school FT complex just vastly more LSI/VLSI and really needs a good SMC construction hand to avoid feeling things up badly still.

But you can see by how they were built internally why they could survive a bit of less kid glove treatment when away from the security of car/van/shack. Although cosmetically the FT8xx series aren't as cosmetically robust, at least the chassis is still very structural rather than merely a board holder and common ground that sums up how some sets got designed and certain old school designs were as bad as modern designs where the shell and chassis are core er-cut functional at best and cosmetically thin enough they'll irreparably be scarred for life if you have a tool accident.

But no matter what kind of rig I refurbished, reworked or replicated around an existing old shell chassis, I couldn't leave a good functional result in a tatty casing - a few extras days of refinement and adding metal or use of metal putty and suchlike (or polymers on plastic cases) was definately worth the extra selling of soul sanity.

The only finish technique I never quite mastered was that really robust old school enamelled finish - but I'm working on that slowly. Where plastic/ABS cases go, it's kind of ironic yet handy that PLA and foamable PLA and ABS filament is hobby market accessible nowadays as with the right prep you could fix scored plastic shells with layered layups of heated stretched filament etc to create a level-ish buildup to sand and match to the old commercial case - and with printed material tech, given a good accurate model to form from, many hen's teeth control/switchgear cosmetics can be remade - hell if you know someone with metal printing kit, you could potentially make up the contact setup and mechs of some of the rarer hen's teeth switches/encoder units.

It's a goldmine era now for the talented and enthusiastic, just a shame our best laid idea plans are very much at odds with the collectors out there and they make some really desirable items we'd love to rebuild and use be destined to be merely objects of curiosity and value accumulated dust gathers.

My comments where I talked about Elecraft and suchlike as radiophile gear, please don't read that as my hating of such things - like a lot of audiophile gear, a pleasure to play with on a good day and maybe one example to own is nice, but it's really a different world and air to what us mere mortals live in and breath.