Kent Single Paddle High Speed Morse Demo by DJ1YFK

[Ham4CW]

This short video I happened across just shows that even without Iambic keying, or even without two paddles, high speed Morse is still possible...

I think I need a little more practice to get up to that speed!

 

[foggycoder]

I love the way his paddle jumps around on the desk as he knocks it back and forth. He clearly does just fine that way but you'd think a couple of blobs of blu-tack would make him even faster!

 

[dj1yfk]

I still love the Kent Single, it's my primary key! In the meantime, I drilled two holes through my shack table and use longer screws for the two front feet to fix the key to the table. That already made the key a lot snappier, but it got even better when I replaced the plastic finger piece (which broke from fatigue failure) with a custom made replacement made of aluminum.

 

[GM0WEZ]

That's interesting. I have the same key, and I replaced the finger piece with one made out of rosewood, which looks nice but I should maybe experiment with aluminium.

I seem to recall in one of the Star Trek films, Scotty the chief engineer talks about 'transparent aluminium'. Looking at the photo it seems to really exist!

 

[dj1yfk]

I took a piece of scrap alu which happened to have nearly the right size, and two minutes later (with the help of a shear), it was done. I am not good with mechanical things but quite happy with how it works and looks now. In the beginning it had a very dull surface with some ugly scratches, but apparently my fingers polished it quite a bit . It's been almost exactly one year since I did this modification.

 

[MI0PYN]

I took a piece of scrap alu which happened to have nearly the right size, and two minutes later (with the help of a shear), it was done. I am not good with mechanical things but quite happy with how it works and looks now. In the beginning it had a very dull surface with some ugly scratches, but apparently my fingers polished it quite a bit . It's been almost exactly one year since I did this modification.

Adds meaning to the term "Polished by use"  ;D