Very smooth built like a tank and heavy.
Bencher by 1 review.
Self adjusting needle bearings and gold plated solid silver contacts.
The rubber feet were loose because of this making the key dance around the table and rock diagonally in use.
Ultimately i had to give those paddles back to their owner and i ve been paddle less ever since.
And since you ll probably own one someday anyway you might as well buy one right off the bat and save the suspense.
I prefer the st 1 single lever a lot.
A few yrs after the trade i saw in qst a mod to make a dual paddle into a single with a simple piece of plastic.
It features adjustable contact spacing and tension.
I picked this up in huntsville at the hamfest.
Works good for us qrs operators a whole lot better then the dual paddle.
The by 1 is a well rounded key.
My bencher by 1 paddles have about a 3 4 oto spacing on the paddles and i have to consciously hold my hand open a bit wider than it naturally wants to be to keep from accidentally touching a paddle.
The heavy steel bases and and non skid feet keep it in place while operating.
But for a first paddle you d have to look long and hard to find a better key to start out with.
I am not a great cw person yet.
Some ops love them some ops don t.
Like the vibroplex bug the bencher by 1 is everywhere.
Bnr by 1 a couple of quick adjustments and it was good to go.
I do recommend that you purchase the universal hookup kit it makes things so easy to get the by 1 connected to your radio and up and running.
Brought it home hooked it up and realized just how much i liked it.
It s nice and crisp i like mine a lot i m sorry to take so long to describe a problem that s caused by a few thousands of an inch of mis alignment.
I got a bencher by 2 and a few years later traded it for a st 1.
One of the things i dislike about the by 1 series is their tendency to fly apart under vigorous keying.
States on the old ameco straight key and used it for a few late night ragchews it had become.
I bought one of these to replace a bencher by 1 i bought in 1980.
Having knocked out more than half the u s.
I learned cw on a set of borrowed bencher by 1 iambic paddles.
The iambic bencher by 1 doesn t have this design problem and a little bit of unflatness doesn t bother it.
The bencher by 1 iambic paddle is just one in a series are dual lever iambic paddles.
Tony offers different oto spacing down to 1 2 which i found to be about perfect.
So far i m very happy with the performance but i ve yet to key a set of begali paddles but the bencher is also less expensive.
