Preamble
I have recently "finished" constructing a U.K. Howes 80M transceiver kit. These kits I understand were popular in the mid-eighties. I managed to pick up a partially assembled kit from the Wyong field day in February 2001. The kit had the TX, RX and VFO in various stages of completion. I was pretty happy to pay the $25 to the previous owner who had the kit but never seemed to finish it.
Construction
It took me around 15-20 hours to put it together and have it basically working. The VFO is pretty solid giving around 80kHz tuning range which is on the money for CW. The transmitter gets good reports for tone and keying performance. The most I managed to get out of the PA is about 4 Watts before the output collapses into oscillation. The receiver is quite a different story though...
The receiver gave me the most problems (no surprise here, I guess). It's a direct conversion design with a small parts count. I haven't seen the mixing design before and don't completely follow it, but it clearly works.
Issues
The main problems I found were with the receiver:
Lessons
The main lessons learnt were to pay early and careful attention to the design and construction of the radio enclosure. Pre-planning the various knobs, dials, switches, power and antenna sockets is very important. Owning a 16mm drill for the PL-259 antenna connectors is important if you want a clean drill hole to mount on. The other struggle was to the variable air-spaced capacitor for the VFO. The particular capacitor used did not mount easily on the front of the enclosure in the traditional way.
Conclusion
A very worthwhile "first" to learn from.