This afternoon I was able to finish one of the stators, Yeahhh !!
Being that it is the First one you know that it would be impossible to go along without some kind of Quirp or Two or Three or Four, almost didn't but it is just not expected.
The first one was that the center support was slightly off on one end making it not perfectly perpendicular to the frame.....Oh well.
This was just laziness and being impatient on my part.
I had set the supports on top of the frame in order to solder the rods to them using the same holes and pins to keep them aligned.
However ,I had forgot to secure them and one of the pins on the live side came out of its hole in the frame causing it to become cockeyed.
I did not notice this until I tried to reassemble it with the frame on top like it is supposed to be and found that it had shifted a 1/16".
I pondered just re-drilling the hole but it was not straight and you could see it.
Then as I was struggling to get the frame back off of the pins the end piece on the same end had snapped off !
No Biggy, I can just glue that back together.
So, I decided I could just easily un-solder the ends and re-solder it back on after re-aligning it, easy fix although time consuming.
As I was un-soldering the ends, Two of the pads had lifted and this destroyed the piece, So, I had to make another one.....More time wasted !!
While I was soldering the rods at first I had no spacer gauge to go by and I just eyeballed them but after the 8th rod this proved that my spacing was getting quite inconsistent and found myself having to spend much time going back over them and re-adjusting a few of them.
This is when I had found my little set of feeler gauges.
This worked perfectly only I had found that my pad spacing's were not where I thought they were at an expected .140" or .141" but .139" about 3mil off and this was relevant by the time I got to the 10th rod near the center.
After a swap of the feeler gauge size all is well and re-adjustment was as simple as re-heating the end of any rod that was in question.
I have built quite a few balsa wood model airplanes so all of those skills came in very handy for me.
All in all it came out very nice after I had fixed it with the new end piece.
Now, I have to find my little wire wheel in order to clean up the ends and take down a few high solder spots and it will be ready for coating.
I sure hate to cover up the pretty copper finish but that will be a subject of another build as I do have some 11" X 36" stators already made from the same TIG rod for some bass panels.
If this works well I will use this same type of construction for to match those bass pieces so that they will be a matching set.
If were to make a building jig these could be made very quickly and easily.
I like my window screen method as well as it is still cheaper to build but the object is to get a wider and even horizontal dispersion of the frequency's with this method.
The TIG rod is nice as it adds a lot of rigidity and is self supporting for the most part compared to a stretched copper wire construction that is so well known that has been used in the industry.
The copper clad is nice as well as this makes it so much easier to solder to the supports than a bare steel wire.
If there is any one thing that I would change is to use a smaller diameter wire.
This same wire can be found on spools called MIG wire and ranges about .023" to .045" diameter sizes,I will investigate this sometime in the future.
Since it comes on spools some kind of stretching may be involved to get them to be perfectly straight, But that will be another project.
And now for what you all have been waiting for............ The pictures of today's progress !!!
Cheers !!!
jer
