marconi 365

[paulg3vcn]

I have had my marconi 365 for 56 years the original base and cover was painted grey. I removed the paint and both are solid brass.
The black ebony plinth on which the key is mounted has a chip on one corner. The contact points are platinum and unscrew if they become worn due to excessive use.Ufortunately, I do not have spares but they are still ok.
I tend to use my chevron paddle now unless a contact is using a straight key. Before the chevron I had a mercury paddle made for me by n2dan now sk. also using magnets instead of springs. Great keys. sold my mercury to purchase chevron.

 

[G4HAA]

Hiya Paul (welcome to the forum!)

As soon as I read that you previously owned a Mercury Paddle I thought "Hmmm, FOC member for sure."

Hadn't heard of Chevron keys (unusual for me), so just had a peek of the website. Nice looking keys, beautiful finish to them for sure.

I see that both of the paddle keys you own/ed use magnetic tensioning. Was that just pot luck or do you have a preference for such systems?

I've got a Bencher Hex Key that uses magnets. The key is solidly made but the magnets are not the best. When I first acquired it I set the magnet gaps to be approximately the same, as I wrongly assumed that the magnetic forces from the magnets would be pretty well equal. Wrong! After tinkering with it for a while I knew something was just not quite correct, so I dug out one of my tension dynamometers so as to measure the force directly on the paddles. I found that one paddle took nearly three times the pressure to operate the contact compared to the opposite one!

A few minutes with the dynamometer allowed me to set the tension to an equal level one both sides. What that did though was to show up the difference between the levels of magnetism between the two halves of the key, with one magnet gap being perhaps as much as two to three times that of its opposite number. Clearly a lack of quality control somewhere.

Oops, getting sidetracked here, supposed to be talking about straight keys!

I've got a Marconi 365b (at least I think it's the B version off the top of my head), and that still has the original grey paint job. I've seen a number of 365's that have been polished back to the brass, and I must say they do look impressive.

There's quite a few ex R.O.s floating about on here, so you're in good company.

73, Mark...

 

[GM0WEZ]

Popular and classic keys, the 365s.

I used to have a 365EZ  which has two holes for spare contacts, which were missing. Astonishingly, there was chap on ebay selling spare contacts, I think originals (they were certainly indistinguishable from the ones on it) so bought them to fill the holes. This was maybe 8 or 10 years ago.

The Marconi contacts are reassuringly huge compared to some keys!

Also had a 365B, with the cover.

I eventually sold both to fund my long lever key obsession, but they were nice keys.

 

[Mickey Morse]

I suspect those huge contacts were needed to handle the power of early spark gap transmitters.  Nobody used anything like that after maybe the 1920's!(?).  So any keys from later eras would probably not be anywhere near so robust.