ENGINEERS come in two basic varieties. There are those who reckon they have had enough of engineering problems by the time they get home from work and refuse to keep so much as a screwdriver in their own homes.
Their garages contain cars, but what about their spare room cupboards?
If you open one of those, you will probably find it full of loudspeakers with wobbly woofers, pop-up toasters which don’t, and that thingymmyjig which fell off the …..(Well, of course I’ll fix it for you darling, but you’ll have to tell me what it was part of in the first place!)
Their wives, according to their means, buy either new toasters or do-it-yourself books and a screwdriver.
Then there is the other type. His garage is so full of tools that it has ceased to be called a garage. He parks his car in the drive, rolls up his sleeves and says: “I’ll have my tea in the workshop, if you don’t mind, darling. I’ve got to put a new grommet in the rumble-fluggit of my jumble-oscillator.”
So enthusiastic is he about his grumble-fluggillator, that his poor wife hasn’t the heart to tell him that the washing machine is leaking again and that she still has to thump the starter motor with a hammer before she can get the Land Rover going.
So she also has to resort to buying a do-it-yourself book and gets into trouble for using his favourite screwdriver.
Corrie was one of the second sort.
They (whoever ‘they’ are) say: “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” I tried it once. As an on-going project, it really took the biscuit!
It started life in Benoni as a ‘build-your-own-amplifier’ kit, full instructions and all components supplied. Well, that was a laugh for a start.
By the time I had sorted out the black-brown-yellows from the red-red–greens, I certainly knew about colour coding. Which is more than can be said for the person who put the resistors in the box.
Then I started on the other components. I don’t remember the details now, but I must have been back to the supplier half-a-dozen times before I had all the right capacitors and my full complement of three-legged transistors.
YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN: More I was born to be a Duchess
Now for the instructions. They were pretty good, on the whole, but obviously not written by one person from beginning to end. Some sections were so detailed that they all but included instructions for holding a screwdriver. Others assumed a basic knowledge to MSc level.
Finally came the day when I could start to assemble this lot. I began with the power supply board, because it looked the easiest.
It didn’t take me very long to discover that one of the components had fat legs and the board had thin holes. Obviously I would have to drill out the holes. Simple – if you have a drill.
I hadn’t, but I did find a reasonably sharp drill bit and spent the rest of the afternoon boring large holes in both the circuit board and my fingertips.
The heat-sinks had to be bolted down. I rummaged in my box of components and found some nuts and bolts. I really thought I was winning, until I found that I had 6BA bolts, 8BA nuts and no washers at all.
I might have given up, but Corrie volunteered to help. I would assemble all the boards and he would do the wiring. We got on pretty fast after that and, by the end of the week, we had everything bolted down to the chassis and ready for testing.
So confident were we, that we even put the thing in its cabinet!
We had virtually no test equipment, but who needs test equipment when all you are doing is assembling a tried and tested design? So we plugged a cassette player into one end and a loudspeaker into the other and switched on.
Have you ever heard a screech-owl being run down by an outboard motor?
We did get it working eventually, after a fashion, but it seemed to be pushing out more power than it was supposed to. I stuck bits of chewing gum on the volume controls, so that they could not be turned up full and we called it a day.
Until the day when one of the children removed the chewing gum, turned up the volume and blew both speakers.
Then we put it in the spare room cupboard, where it collected dust for the next two years.
HAVE YOUR SAY
Like our Facebook page, follow us on Twitter and Instagram
For news straight to your phone, add us on BBM 58F3D7A7 or WhatsApp 082 421 6033
