[today’s run: 5.0 miles]
Well, I did end up finding some parts that will work for that -40 db tap project which I spoke about in the last post to this blog.
At Lowes I located a 6 inch section of repair pipe, which is slightly larger than regular sizes of copper pipe. They did not have the end caps called for in the web article. But they did have something called a ‘bushing’ which is a piece of thicker-walled tubing about an inch long which fits nicely inside the repair pipe.
I sawed the bushing in half. It is kind of ugly, but I did end up with two flush ends. I had some brass sheeting left over from building the RF power meter. I used tin snips to cut out a square of brass larger than the outside diameter of the repair pipe. I then used the soldering gun to butter that up well with solder, got it all tinned up good.
Then I heated the bushing part and put some solder on it also, just on the flush end. The bushing is heavy enough material it retains the heat for quite a while. I put the hot bushing face down on the tinned brass sheeting and that melted them together.
After things cooled down I put the new plug into the end of my repair pipe and trimmed around the pipe with the tin snips.
I drilled a hole in the middle for the BNC connector, one on each end. It is a pretty close fit, I could not get a socket wrench in there, but turning the home-made cap while holding the BNC connector with pliers tightened it all up.
Then I cut out a 2″ section of the repair pipe (with a pipe cutting tool) and got the new end caps all situated.
Next is to build the internals of the tap. He calls for 10 49.9k 1% resistors, which I happen to have already. So I have all of the pieces.
One thing I don’t have covered is a good way to drill through the pipe and the bushing/end-cap to put in a screw to hold the cap in place. I’m going to have to research how to drill thick copper.
