In the previous post, should you have been so unfortunate as to have read it, you saw that I had gotten a Bencher BY-2 Chrome Iambic Paddle set.
Very exciting.
…to a very niche market, of which I am a member.
Way back in the early days of my Ham Radio avocation, most of the guys I met in the hobby were a strange mix of filthy rich and cheap bastards. Spend a 4-digit fortune on a transceiver? No problem. High 3-digits on a tower? No problem. But then they’d turn right around and bitch about the cost of the coax cable to go up the tower, and the sacks of concrete to secure the base of the tower.
So it didn’t surprise me that they could afford a morse code key thingy-jobber that cost a couple hundred bucks. I could not afford such a thing.
Nor did it surprise me that the price was that high. It’s not like every ham is gonna buy one. Many will instead use some crusty military-surplus thing that barely works… and they’ll brag about how much money they saved. These guys are a really weird bunch. But anyway, my point is that Bencher couldn’t make any money off economy of scale because the market won’t all go buy it. Only a few of them will.
Anyway – I didn’t.
Until about a month ago, then suddenly I got ants in my pants while on eBay, and I bid on several different auctions of Iambic Paddle sets. The one I really wanted was a handmade-in-Germany thing. They’re legendary. I didn’t get it.
But I won TWO of the others – two different models from Bencher. Both were dusty, crusty, with tarnished contacts, and seriously out-of-alignment.
I got them both cleaned up and working beautifully. Now I’m keeping the cheaper, uglier, nastier of the two (better match for my personality), and selling the pretty, shiny one. Or trying to, anyway.
https://minneapolis.craigslist.org/ank/ele/d/circle-pines-bencher-by-2-iambic-paddle/6872496832.html
