Cache Lake Country

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When all the turns were wound, the end of the wire was again fastened by passing it back and forth through pinholes in the tube. Then we painted the coil with candle wax to keep the wire in place. While we were doing that the Chief made a little wooden disk to go on top of the coil to hold the crystal detector.

Making the movable condenser had us puzzled for a while, but we looked on the diagram and it said tinfoil would do, so we started to hunt and it wasn't long before the Chief thought of the tinfoil lining of the packages our tea comes in. We got enough to make two sheets four by six inches and the Chief smoothed it out very evenly with the edge of a knife. We also needed some waxed paper and found what we wanted on a package of dry cereal. Meantime Hank cut out a pine baseboard for our set 14 inches long and 12 inches wide.

The first thing we did then was to start on the condenser and you will get an idea from our friend's diagram how we made it. Out of an old piece of tongued and grooved siding I cut two narrow guides and from another piece of the board we made a slider five and one-quarter inches wide and six inches long. Fitted between the two guides, this piece slides back and forth very nicely after being shellacked and waxed, making it easy to adjust the condenser.

The next step was to use shellac to fasten one of the sheets of tinfoil onto the baseboard at a 45-degree angle, leaving one corner free to connect a wire, and then covering it with waxed paper extending the full width and length of the guides which are twelve inches long. Then we screwed the guides in place on top of the waxed paper, making sure that the slider board moved back and forth freely with just enough clearance so it didn't touch the baseboard.

On the bottom of the slider at a 45-degree angle we fastened the other sheet of tinfoil, which was also glued down with shellac, leaving one end turned up over the edge of the slide for connecting a wire. The slider ought to be shellacked, too, for you want to keep all wood parts as dry as possible. Then the Chief screwed the spool on top for a handle, fitted wood strips at each end as stops for the slide, and our condenser was done.

I used two narrow strips of brass cut from the name plate of an old canoe for the two switch blades and then copper wires from the various taps on the coil were brought down and fastened under brass-headed tacks. The connections for the earphones, antenna, and ground were made of little bits of copper wire, but we hope to have something better, such as a binding post, or spring clips, someday.

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