mat@hou5e.UUCP (06/26/83)
I just assembled one of these babies. It is the H29 with the detatched keyboard. I figure it took me about 28 hours, including all of the checking and rechecking, etc. It went together quite nicely, with just a few minor glitches. In the directions, a few steps were not marked as clearly as the rest, and I missed them the first time around. As I checked my work at the end of every page, and then checked what I needed for the next page, most of these got caught quickly. I had a couple of little problems reading color codes on componenets. After three years of being away from building things electronic, I found that I knew the codes by sight after only a few hours ... but the stripes on the ``new'' film resistors are much tougher to read than they were on the older composite resistors ... and I don't quite understand the greater variety of coding layouts that have come into wider use in the last 6? or so years. No matter -- all the colors sre given in the directions. The only nuisance was reading them off the resistors. I twice mixed up orange (x1000) and gold (x .1) third bands, but found out when I came up short on the other kind. When the time came to install the power supply/RF trap boards, I found that the directions were not quite up to the quality of the remainder of the kit. Also, one of the stranded wires from the transformer wouldn't fit in the hole on the board. That was easy to fix. When the power supply board is installed, the regulator IC must be bent to reach the heat sink AFTER its leads have been soldered into place. I managed to peel the foil off the board here. Incidentally, the boards are VERY good, with an excellent anti-flux applied over most of the board. Solder bridges seem just about impossible. When I saw the number of parts and the rather scattered way that they were packaged for the video board, as I went through the parts checklist, I decided to label the checklist with WHERE I found each part. This turned out to be a VERY good move. This was my first Heathkit, and I was scared when I powered it up the first time. The logic board is preassembled, but you do the video board ... which seems kind of backward to me, since if the video board gives trouble, you have to discharge the 2nd anode to take it out. Logic boards use nice levels like 5 volts and 12 volts. In fact, it worked first time. The alignment went well, although I haven't quite got the linearity compensation magnets perfect. A nice kit, and s few evenings of careful but interesting work. It's also a fairly ggod looking terminal. In Zenith mode (it has Zenith, ANSI, hazeltine, and adm3a) vi runs very well; I have a setup file that sets the modes that I want and even sets the clock! Mark Terribile Duke of deNet