Former WBRT owner and former co-host of my radio show told me once that when he gets fired up and writes a vitriol-filled letter or e-mail, he always sleeps on it before he sends it.
I've found time and time again that his words of advice are sound.
Frankly, I was ready to let 'er rip on this seller who did such a crappy and inadequate job packing my 1941 McElroy bug. In the world of eBay, the buyer is the only one now who can leave negative feedback — eBay won't let sellers do that anymore. As a seller, you can bitch and moan about the buyer, but it has to be in positive feedback (eBay did this because bitchy sellers were driving away buyers).
The problem I had with my smokin'-hot e-mail and very big-honkin' negative feedback I was preparing was that none of that was going to right the “wrong.” It wouldn't fix a thing. I still have a rare box that's been partly splintered. Will venting rage at the seller make it better? It might make me feel good for a moment, but it won't help in the long run.
Now in the scheme of normal transactions, my complaint to the seller would probably mean he would tell me to ship it back for a refund. And if this was a normal eBay item, I would probably do that. But this isn't a “normal” item — its a 70-year-old semi-automatic bug in its original shipping box. And the truth is I sure didn't want to ship the key back.
Instead of blistering the keys on my keyboard in feedback, I went to work.
The damage to the box and the lid weren't beyond repair. I don't want to send the key back, so why not repair the box? The splits were along the grain and were fairly neat; the pieces were all there and they assembled back into whole pieces.
With glue, clamps, retractors, scalpels and all my other hand tools at my disposal, I glued, clamped and cajoled the parts back together. After several hours drying time, I can attest to the fact that the repairs are nearly invisible (beyond the fact that for a few moments the lid was glued to the laminate top of one of my desks!).
My wife went to bed early, so I retired to the shack early. With the key box back in one piece — the lid slid in the slots perfectly — I next went to the key. Ahh, the key! The key!
Beautiful, a work of art. OK … maybe I'm a little over the top, its not quite as sexy as a Vibroplex bug, but its in such pristine shape, it feels like its 1941.
I decided to try out the key … the contacts were pristine, the dits were fast and clean. It really does have that new key feel, lol.
Using some jumper clips, I hooked the key up to my other bug and began tuning the old Novice portion of the 40 meter band. The 7.0-7.25 segment is usually alive with CW signals — more so now than 15 years ago. The guys who enjoy slower CW gather here, as do the Straight Key Century Club members.
I tuned across a guy calling CQ, a “2” in New York. The guy, Dick, lived on Long Island, actually not too far from the world HQ of CQ magazine — Hicksville, NY. So while he was wrapping up his CQ, I roughly tuned the antenna tuner for 40. After he signed, I cut the power down on the rig and began fine-tuning the antenna tuner for a good match, then I cranked the power back up to about 50 watts before letting off the key. He knew what I was doing, so he sent another short CQ to make sure I got his call and signed.
We spent about an hour chatting, using my new McElroy P500. He was collecting SKCC numbers, so we exchanged numbers. I'm something of a “celebrity” in the SKCC world because I have a number under 290 (the club has nearly 8,000 members).
It was pretty much a standard chat — gear, weather, etc., but it felt really good: I had my new McElroy key on the air for the first time in … years? Decades? Who knows how long its been? For a few moments, I found myself flashing back to 1941 … my shack was in my grandfather's barn. I'm running a homebrew regen receiver and a 2-tube crystal transmitter. The antenna is loose-coupled to the end-fed Hertz antenna that runs from the end of the hay loft of Granddaddy's barn up to the peak of the house some 130 feet away. I'm running a 6L6 in the transmitter, but I salivate for a pair of 807s in push-pull that I saw in the handbook a year or two back. I'm saving money to buy my dream receiver — an RCA AR-77 receiver I saw last year in the RCA Ham Tips and in QST.
Well, thankfully my rig wasn't a homebrew one … it was my Yaesu FT-2000. I did have a “boat anchor” of sorts on standby — the Tempo 2020. It's really a sweet little CW rig on its own, with a very nice CW filter that was a standard feature.
It's funny, but new habits die hard — when I make a contact on the Tempo 2020 (usually a CW contact), I still look at the LCD display hooked to the Yaesu to check out the other signals on the band; of course, the rig isn't on and the antenna input of the rig is switched to ground, so the bandscope is a flat line.
It was a nice QSO with Dick, a ham whose 20 years my senior and had a great fist using a homebrewed straight key. I'll look for him again.
So I'll give the seller who shipped me the key pretty fair feedback. I might e-mail him privately and advise him to better pack code keys should he sell one. Guys who collect the things can be really assholes!
I think I'm going to find a small bolt and a wing nut and use it to secure the P500 to the wood box as they did from the factory. Well, I'll buy the hardware, but I'm not quite ready to put it in the box permanently yet, I really like the key's feel. Of all the McElroy keys I've used, this one has the lightest feel.
73 es CUL … de KY4Z … dit dit