This is the saga of the rebuild of an
old (1972) Henry 2k-3 Kilowatt Linear Amp. Of course,
this is an amp for Ham band use. It covers
80-10 meters. The tube compliment is a pair of
3-500Z tubes. I intend to throw a pair
of 4-400s into the slot, but that's another story for
later on...
I've decided that the amp's name is "Hank Tookay"!! :-)
As it arrived here almost a decade ago
it was missing the meters, and had a number of other
problems. This venerable workhorse had
been not taken care of by its previous owners.
So, the first problem was to get the right
meters. The old Henry used surface mount meters -
meaning that the panel meters had no
rear barrel or box as do 99.9% of all other panel meters.
They mounted with just two holes, one
for each lead to the meter. This made it possible for
Henry to leave very little space between
the front panel and the sub panel. But the down side
is that these meters did not prove to
be very popular (I can't figure why...) and they became
almost impossible to find by the time
I got the unit. The only other option was to retrofit
another style of meter, which meant punching
holes in the front panel... IF you could find one
that was not too deep. The original meters
were those "heart" shaped ones. You may have seen
them.
But I wasn't thrilled with the prospect
- and the "right" meters didn't manage to show up either.
I was able to track down a pair of almost
original meters, surface mount, but slightly narrower
mounting holes finally. This put the
project back onto a burner, front or not.
I had already taken the front panel apart:
I found that the Bandswitch was off the
mount in front (shown). The concentric meter function
switch/SWR pot was trashed. The RF carrying
strap shown hanging in the middle was cold soldered
in an attempt to repair it. Inside, one
of the bandswitch's contacts was fried nicely. Otherwise it was
pretty much intact on the RF deck. The
blower was missing, as was the blower plate.
The plan is to replace the SWR pot by
drilling a new hole and mounting the pot off to the left side
of the meter function switch, and throw
out the brass concentric mtg bracket (shown), cut down the
shaft and remount. The RF strap was corrected
and resoldered properly. It was found that there
were two extra contacts sitting on the
bandswitch that clearly had no connections and were not in
use - attached with small screws and
nuts. The bad contact was removed via a light drilling of the
rivet, and replaced with the new screw
mounted one. Very happy. The bandswitch front mount only
needed to be screwed back in, using an
angle screwdriver.