I have just completed building the Weston Bye Magnetic Clock circuit board.
Here is a picture of how it looks finished.
If you don't consider yourself an electronic guru, you may wish to just buy the assembled board from Weston. But, it is very easy to build, providing you have a few hand tools and know how to identify and install the parts in the board.
The board comes with a bigger than life picture, which is quite easy to follow. The circuit board is double sided and has plated thru holes. An excellent quality board!
So lets talk about putting it together. First you need just a few tools. Here is a picture of what you need.
Both the Needle Nose and Diagonal Cutters are what are called "3 Inch Tools," being made especially for working on Circuit Board projects.
The Soldering Pencil is a 25 Watt unit with a 1/8" chisel tip. That is the size you need for doing small PCB soldering. Anything of higher wattage or with a wider tip will possibly burn the foils right off of the PCB, or be so wide you will be bridging adjacent pads when applying solder to a connection on the board.
And of course you need some very fine Rosin Core 60/40 Electronic Solder.
Looking at Weston's board picture, start by installing the two Integrated Circuit sockets. Be sure to orient the notched end the way the notches in the end of the2 IC's show in the picture.
Next solder in the large blue Electrolytic Capacitor, making sure the line of "minus" signs are pointing the correct direction. Next solder in the 1N4004 and 1N4743 diodes. Be sure that the end with the band is on the + end as shown in the picture.
Next solder in the 6 smaller diodes, the iN914's. There are 6 on the board. Make sure the black band on each is pointing the correct way, as shown in the picture.
Next install the 3 .1uF capacitors. They are marked 1.04M Then the 10 and 22 pF capacitors. They are clearly marked as 10 and 22.
Now carefully install the 32768 Hz crystal. Make sure also install the hold down loop over the body of the crystal.
Now install all the resistors. Here is their color code to make it easier to made sure they are correct.
100 Ohm: Brown Black Brown
10K Ohm: Brown Black Orange
330K Ohm: Orange Orange Yellow
5.1 Meg Ohm: Green Brown Blue
10 Meg Ohm: Brown Black Green
Next install the
CENTER IRLZ34N Driver Transistor
Now install the 2 outside ones, tilting them just enough away from the center one to make sure the metal parts do not touch together.
Next is to install the two Integrated Circuits. Make sure you identify them by the numbers on the top, before plugging them into the sockets!
You will find that the pins are two wide to simply push into the sockets. What I do is very slightly roll each sides pins on a flat surface to just very slightly bend them toward the center of the chip. This will allow you to easily insert both sides into the sockets at the same time.
That's it! You can now attach power and magnet wires to the appropriate places on the board.
With the components supplied, you can expect accuracy to be well within a few seconds a day. If you have a good frequency counter, you may need to tweak the Oscillator Circuit a little. My recommendation is to replace the 10pF capacitor with a 15 turn "gimmick." That is simply a pair of wires wrapped very tightly with 15 turns. This will make a 15pF capacitor. This should make the crystal frequency lower than it should be by a few Hz. Simply cut off one turn at a time from the gimmick to increase the frequency of the crystal a few Hz.
Here is a pictures of a gimmick:
And one last thing, If you don't have the proper tools, don't feel comfortable soldering in small parts, don't have a frequency counter, please consider hav1ng Weston build the board for you.
Hope all this helps,
George