When this core was measured and cut, Lee began to wind it smoothly in the strips of tough brown wrapping paper that he had already prepared. As he wound it on, Lem, armed with the little can of shellac and a stiff feather for a brush, bent above the job and carefully shellacked each piece.
After the neatly wrapped core with its dose of the sticky gum had dried out a little, the hardest task of all was undertaken—winding on the wire tuning coil itself. The paper strips had been easy to handle, but managing the lively, wriggling wire was a very difficult task.
“Help, everybody! We’ve got to step lively to get this thing on right away, while the shellac is still some sticky, so it will hold the wire firm.” Lee waved his roll of wire, and there was a general rush for everyone to have a finger in this excitement.
A couple of fellows held the wire taut, and another couple, gripping the ends of the wooden rod with tense fingers, turned it steadily. As the master hand, Lee laid the coils in place at each turn. With even the simple machinery of a lathe and foot pedal, it would have been an easy job to wind the core. But with only excited boyish fingers to grip and turn, the task was one of considerable difficulty. The wire would writhe and knot. Now and again coils slipped and refused to lie smooth.
“Unwind it! Try it again!” Brows bent, mouth set firmly, Lee unwound and rewound, over and over again. This thing had to be right. No use making it if the wire didn’t lie smooth and close, without any space at all between the coils.
“Um! That looks sort of like it now!” Lee said with satisfaction as he fastened down the last tag end.
The other boys drew close and gazed upon it pridefully.
“Gosh, it does look right! Slicker’n silk, and 'pears to be real close kin to that there picture in the book,” Big Sandy said, holding the illustration of the tuning coil in a “Radio World” up beside their effort in wire and wood. “I thought you was being tollable persnikerty, doing it over so much, but reckon you was right.”
“The sliding contacts come next. Wonder if we can mount them now?” In lieu of store-bought metallic contacts, Lee produced a pair of old metal curtain rings. “Got to punch holes in ’em so we can stick in the copper rivets.”
And so the work went forward. Night after night the gang met in Lee’s workshop. There was a certain amount of the apparatus that even untrained hands could attend to, such as cutting the four-inch squares of paraffined paper and tinfoil, alternating these in a stack, then placing these between two blocks of wood and screwing them tightly together. This was the “condenser” that, according to the printed directions, was to help the electric vibrations pass through the earphone receivers.