Builder gear

What gear should a builder have?

By Matt Erickson KK5DR

As an amplifier or antenna tuner builder, you should have certain pieces of gear and there are other pieces of gear you might like to have as well, here I’ll tell you about them.

For the amp builder:

A good grid-dip meter, and or SWR analyzer really make the work of building an amplifier or antenna tuner much easier. There are techniques and procedures for using these units that improve the building experience.

LCR meter, with one of these, checking capacitance and inductance becomes easy. I use a digital unit that is about the same as a standard Digital VOM in both price and size. It also has a low resistance measuring ability which helps when trying to measure very low resistances that many VOM have difficulty reading accurately.

Speaking of VOM’s every ham should own at least one very good VOM. I own several, both in analog and digital forms. If you are building tube-type amplifiers or plan to repair them, it would be a good idea to have a high voltage probe that can be used with one of your VOM’s. VOM’s that can read over 1kV are getting pretty hard to find. So, investing in a good HV probe will make the work much more safe.

Soldering, A good controlled temperature solder iron in the 25-50 watts range will be used allot. For heavier soldering a good 100-300 watts solder gun is a must.

In some cases a small gas torch will be handy as well. I have all of these units.

Drilling, as a builder, you WILL be doing a huge amount of drilling. A good variable speed drill and a large selection of high quality bits will be needed. Drill bits do get dull, and sharpening them can be very difficult. I recommend a Drill Doctorâ, this device makes sharpening drill bits a breeze. It will pay for itself in a very short time. If you have a Drill-press it will be a handy tool in some cases. An auto-center-punch, is a cheap item, that makes the layout and marking of drill points really easy. I love mine, I’ll never be without it for building.

A Dremel® tool sure makes shaping and cutting metal much more easy, and would have many uses aside of radio projects.

A set of hole saws for the drill are great for cutting those nice round larger holes. For even larger holes that might not all be round, use a jig-saw and have a nice selection of blades. A good Hack-saw and a set of blades in various cuts will be needed allot.

In the “nice to have” area, an oscilloscope can be handy in testing what you have built or trouble-shooting a problem in it. This is not a “must-have” item but they can be had fairly cheap now. Many ham-fests have a good selection of nice used scopes at low prices. I will recommend a unit that has at least 30MHz of band-width and dual traces. Even more important is a good set of probes for the scope.

A builder with a nice selection of layout tools like scribes, dividers, rulers, tape measures, & a simple set of calipers, will have an easier time building quality gear.

I’m sure there are many more tools that would help the job, but these are the basics that go a long way to aiding the work.

73 de Matt KK5DR