I wasn’t planning to do any work on my MKARS80 last night but there was a lot of activity going on nearby so I made the most of the time while waiting for things to calm outside.
Firstly I finished the resistors, diodes and some capacitors in bag 1. There is a note in the manual to be careful not to confuse 4k7 and 47k resistors so I measured each strip of resistors to be sure I was putting the right part in the correct hole.
After finishing bag 1 I moved on to bag 2. Bag 2 is mostly small ceramic capacitors, 33 in fact. With the resistors I was happy to hunt around and find the ones I needed as the same value resistors were joined together making it easier to get the right ones. If the section of the manual needed 5 resistor of the same value I checked the groups of five to get the ones I needed. Pretty easy stuff.
Once I had emptied bag 2 on the bench it was obvious that the same method was not going to work with the capacitors. Apart from the fact they were all separate, the printing on the capacitors is so small that my tired eyes have trouble reading it without a magnifying glass. To make it easy on myself I sorted the capacitors into their values and placed them into a piece of foam. This was just ordinary Styrofoam, not the anti-static product, so I would only use it for passive components. I wrote the values of the capacitors on the foam as well.
By pre-sorting the capacitors it did speed the assembly process a little as I only needed to read the values once!
After finishing bag 2 I made a start on bag 3 and soldered in two Zener diodes. The next components on the list are 51 X 100 nF ceramic capacitors. As it was almost midnight I decided this was a good time for a break.
Looking ahead I see bag 3 also contains the inductors and transformers that need to be carefully wound and the leads prepared before soldering. It may take more than one session to complete bag 3. Perhaps the capacitors one night and the inductors the next night.
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