Radio Shack Morse Code Keys

 Radio Shack, in my experience, sold two straight Morse keys in the last quarter of the 20th century.  The photo below, from Page 166 of the 1979 Radio Shack catalog shows the cheap plastic key, Cat No. 20-185, priced at \$1.99. That's \$8.17 in in 2022 money.   The more expensive brass hand key, Cat No 20-1084 sold for  \$4.49 then ($18.43 in 2022 dollars).  I got the image from a very wonderful site at https://radioshackcatalogs.com .

I bought a key in the early '80s and being practical and poor, I bought the  cheap plastic version and used it for a decade or so.  Later, as I picked up old timer buddies and bought a silent key's estate, I picked up several different vintage keys.  My favorite was a military J-38 key,  it was "poetry in motion."... 

Mike apparently has a brass key which hopefully he'll maybe feature in some future posts.  I'm going to discuss the cheap plastic key here, because it was "for the masses" and did the job well. 

    I'm borrowing the nomenclature of the key from KD2UJ's "Parts of a Telegraph" page.   The actual photos are taken from a completed Ebay.com auction. The auction ended on 11/30/2022 and sold for \$12.95.   A labelled photo is shown below.

Construction:  The key was cheaply constructed, but that was the whole point: 

• The frame and knob were black plastic. Not particularly bullet proof, but sturdy enough
• The lever and trunnion were stamped plated steel or stainless steel.
• Binding posts, gap adjust and sprint tension screws were simple knurled knob screws. I don't know if they were inch or metric.
• The key had no ball bearing in the trunnion.  The lever simply snapped into the trunnion at opposing holes and was held by the tension of the trunnion. Electrical continuity to the lever was through the trunnion bearing. 
• The wiring was done through stamped metal straps on the underside of the plastic base as shown in the photo below.

Operation: 

• I mounted the key on a 1X4 piece of wood that was 6 inches long.  I put rubber feet on the wood.  The key was in a fairly natural position. 
• The key gave a definite tactile stop when it hit the contact going down and also a nice tactile feel coming back up as it hit the travel limit.  This felt natural and I could do maybe 15 wpm comfortably without a lot of strain.  

For comparison to the "good old days" I searched around for cheap, utilitarian hand keys on Ebay.com, Amazon.com, and Aliexpress.com.  I couldn't find any straight, traditionally contructed hand keys for less than about \$35 on any of the three sites.  Amazon.com did have very cheap keys for about \$6.  An example is shown below.

I don't really like this style of key and I wouldn't recommend it as a beginner's key. It would have a very mushy feel, and given the lack of a limit stop, it would only be suitable for very slow keying.  Additionally, a beginner would have to "unlearn" the feel of this key to move on to a traditional key.