Following the instructions of the TV Typewriter construction guide, the first thing to do after recreating my TVT boards (again and again) is to drill them out and work on aligning the stack connectors.  I knew this was going to be a problem from the get go — to test alignment as well as make sure scale wasn’t being lost during scanning or printing, I actually printed the artwork onto transparencies and then compared to the originals in the guide.  The issue I ran into was the stack connectors – the ‘bus’ that the four TVT boards connect via.  A quick study of the alignment of these using the transparencies revealed that between boards, they didn’t quite line up.  I supposed this could have been due to 40 years of humidity acting upon the paper of the guide, although I also have two copies of the Mark-8 construction guide and there is no difference between the artwork in those dimensionally or otherwise.  It could also simply be errors – I had read some contemporaneous accounts of TVT builders that complained of issues with alignment.  Anyway, after carefully considering the issue, I decided I could just ‘make it work’ by carefully adjusting the pins as I installed them.  Altering the artwork seemed like a fools errand – it might fix the connector problem but risked distorting everything else.

Anyway, after making the boards, I’ve drilled them and began removing the Molex connectors from my first, erroneous board set, and installing them on the ‘new’.  I also installed my new transformer, as well as the control switches (bottom) for test fitting.  So far so good, although the transformer sits a little too close to the board stack.

In terms of alignment vertically.. yeah.. it’s not pretty.  But I’ve confirmed it’ll work.  Now to solder in all 24 molex connectors and 240 pins (again.. ugh)!!