I made further progress with the wattmeter tonight. It was time to prepare the wires, which consisted of cutting them to various lengths and removing the isolation at the ends. Here I faced the first difficulty in trying to follow the instructions of the manual.
The wires included in the kit consist of an eight-condcutor cable and the assembly instructions say that one should remove 1″ of the outer jacket to expose the eight separate wires inside whereafter one is supposed to pull out the wires out one or two at a time. This is impossible! As you can see on the picture below, the wires are quite weaved into each other and, although I tried pulling them, all I achieved was breaking them. So, I just cut the rest of the outer jacket very carefully with a sharp knife and freed the wires that way instead. Besides that I can say that I find the idea of preparing all the wires before use to be a very good idea.
After I finished the wires and mounted some of them on the two switches, I could continue with the preparation of the cabinet. The kit includes two very nice, pre-printed labels for the front and the back of the cabinet. They are printed on some very strong self-adhesive plastic and both of them fit very well on the cabinet. They stick to the cabinet very strongly, so one has to be very carefull when fitting them. Once they stick there is no way of removing them without causing damage. Of course, I had find out about this the hard way…
Once the stickers were on the cabinet, I could go on and mount the antenna connectors and the switches. Everything fitted all right in the relatively robust cabinet, although I chose to cut the unused pins on the switches before mounting them. TGhis way mounting them was very easy.
Time to go to bed now, but tomorrow I will continue and try to finish this very cool wattmeter.