New Shack Furniture

Somehow I wanted to combine my other hobby, woodworking, with ham radio, and the best thing that I came with is this radio shack. The entire design concept is formed around the FT-817 and its accessories, a space for a small shack PC for logging and various interfaces, and some future equipment that I would like to accommodate. Practically, almost every space there is or will be assigned to something particular.

Wooden Ham Radio Shack

Dimensions are 700 mm length, 550 mm height and 170 mm depth. The body is made out of laminated pine boards, 18 mm tick, available almost in every hardware store around Europe at least. Some stores even cut your boards to your desired dimensions, so I did to save some time and dust in the house…The horizontal front edges are mahogany strips of 20 x 10 mm found in a store here in Trieste. Gives a better aspect and contrast to the rack. And the finish is an acrylic glossy transparent varnish.

Various Angles

For the microphone cord I’ve made this cutout to get it out. It is long enough to plug also the headphones jack.

FT-817 Mike Plug Cutout

Finally I have somewhere to use this microphone hanger that came with the transceiver.

FT-817 Mike Hanger

Initially I wanted to make a build video with this project, but I wasn’t well equipped with lights and tripod, so I did only some pictures during construction, in order to make at least a photo slideshow video. Unfortunately some month ago my laptop’s hard drive physically broke and I’ve lost everything. Luckily I was able to make this video build with the construction of the drawers, and uploaded to Youtube before the hdd failure:

It was fun building it, many hours after work of sawing, chiseling and sanding…a lot of sanding, but I am very pleased with the result.

YO4HHP Ham Shack