[BC] Coil on Oat Meal Box...

[RichardBJohnson at comcast.net]

Hahahahahahahaha!
PVC???? We had CAST IRON sewer pipe, with the joints filled with Oakum (read Hemp --er MaryJane), and poured with lead! For coil forms, we had two choices, oatmeal boxes or toilet-paper rolls. Choose your size! The most common "coil wire" was #22 DCC (double cotton-covered). Apparently TELCO used a lot of that stuff. Enameled wire was expensive. If you wanted to make an adjustable coil with a slider, you would first wind the coil, then saturate it with shellac. After it was dry, you would mark the arc of your slider with chalk and then carefully sandpaper through the shelac and cotton cover. It was all in the Boy Scout manual --good for a Merit Badge if the receiver worked. Even good for an 'atta-boy' even if it didn't.

I made a variometer with both the Quaker Oats box and the toilet paper roll.
http://www.schmarder.com/radios/misc-stuff/variometer.htm

This allowed me to tune with a knob, but I couldn't cover the whole broadcast band except by changing some taps.

Cheers,
Richard B. Johnson
Book: http://www.AbominableFirebug.com/

----- Original Message -----
From: tg at btsg.com

HI Burt,

I do something similar with various sizes of thin wall PVC pipe.  The PVC is easy to mount on some
old leftover porcelain resistor standoffs.