Hi gang-- I got down to some serious chassis work on my 6U8 superhet this weekend, and it occurred to me the general approach I use might be new to some people, tho I can hardly claim to have invented it. Wish I had better facilities to deliver images. With some luck I'll have my Junkbox Radio page up on the Web before the end of the year. One picture would make the whole thing as obvious as a popped electrolytic. But the idea is this: I take a typical aluminum chassis such that one can buy from AES, along with a matching bottom plate, either boughten or hacked up from sheet stock. The chassis I invert, and use the bottom plate as the main platform for construction. That is, the tubes, the IF cans, and so on, are mounted to the bottom plate. This makes the receiver MUCH easier to wire, as I'm not "digging down into the well" so much, as I would be if I were wiring parts underneath a chassis in the traditional fashion. But it gets better. I hack up a front panel out of more sheet stock, and bolt it to the chassis bottom plate with 1" X 1" aluminum angle like you see at the hardware superstores. For smaller assemblies I've used Erector Set angle girders, which are nickel-plated steel and punched with accurate holes every 1/2". You can sometimes pick up modern Erector Sets (not the ancient Gilbert sets, which are now collectibles) at garage sales for a few bucks, and the girders and brackets can be *very* useful in chassis work. You now have a front panel bolted to the horizontal plate where the bottles and cans actually live. One more step: You remove the front face from the upside-down chassis. Three cuts with a saber saw did it for me, plus a little file work to even out the edges. Leave yourself at least 3/8" on each side to give you a flange into which to sink a couple of sheet metal screws. The front panel/horizontal plate assembly can now be bolted neatly to the upside-down chassis, giving a very rigid unit with an RF-tight compartment inside the chassis. Virtually all the wiring can be done on the plate-and-panel assembly, leaving nothing but the fuse holder, power cord, and SO-238 on the chassis itself. I put a 1 3/4" steel spacer on the back edge of the horizontal plate to act as a "foot" to keep the working assembly more-or-less horizontal when it's not bolted to the chassis box. I got as far as mounting the Velvet Vernier mechanism and the RF amp tuning cap before I ran out of weekend. There aren't a lot of controls and I should be able to get the rest of them mounted this week. My only regret on this project is that I didn't go to the next larger chassis size. But isn't that always the case? --73-- --Jeff Duntemann KG7JF Scottsdale, Arizona