The Homemade Drake Power Supply
A good friend has just past onto me an old home-made power supply for Drake equipment, along with the other piece of equipment which I have in another post here, i.e., the Drake T-4X transmitter which both kindly given by Douglas (GD3RFK).
The Drake Power Supply was originally made by another old Ham on the island, Mike Farrant (GD4BEG) and it’s a typical Mike project, as in it will work, it will do the job, it may not look pretty, and it is bound to be made up of many old parts that he would have salvaged from old parts around his shack.
Mike is one of those guys who I have a great respect off, he was a proper engineer working with Valve and big RF equipment back in the day, and if you check out a lot of the older Radio Magazines back then you will see his callsign right in the top spot for CW contests world-wide with some monster scores.
I was very lucky to be given a lot of his stuff when Mike moved home and he needed a clear-out of his old workshops, looking back I should have grabbed more when I had the chance, especially as I have been restoring a couple of things of his now, the KW Vanguard and the Hellicrafter to name a couple or the larger projects I have on the go.
This power supply is typical Mike though, it certainly may not look pretty, in fact it looks like it was built in the morning to operate in the afternoon like most of his project builds, it must have been fun to be around Mike when he was working on stuff like this.
The very first thing that I will be doing with this is working out how it works, to do tis I will be drawing out a schematic so that I can check what should be happening, after that and some checking with a multimeter, when I am happy with it I will switch on and test again, obviously without a Drake set connected, if all goes right then, I may just have to rebox this into a new case and clean up, you never know I may be able to fit this inside of a Drake PSU Case if I can locate one, may just be worth the challenge.
As I said before, the Drake Power Supply is not pretty, it was not meant to be, its meant to work in a ‘get the job done’ principle which hopefully it still does.
Some of the components in this Drake Power Supply look as though they just may have been installed not too long ago, but I will have to just check them anyway, all of the capacitors I will check with an capacitance (ESR) meter for leakage, but will replace them all anyway, always best to.
I will need to remove these to clean up around them before installing replacements into place, although the unit is somewhat ‘make-shift’, with a bit of a clean-up it will look quite good anyway.
The underside of the unit shows off the good old tag board approach to building stuff the oldie world way, simplistic and very nostalgic, god I love the old days.
This should be one of the quicker projects on the go at the moment and will hopefully be able to be completed in short order providing nothing is too wrong with it, the only thing that will slow this down for me is if it needs more smoothing, or changing around drastically, the housing of it may be another problem entirely the more I look at it the more I think that it will not fit inside an old Drake Power Supply case so I may have to go down the route of something totally different, I cannot leave it naked so to speak, too many cats around here, but I will get around to this later…
More to come…
Drake R-4C Receiver Restoration Project
Drake T-4X Transmitter Restoration Project
Last Updated : 1st August 2024
