I stood on the corner of 86th and Broadway last Saturday morning. It was raining, so I was wet. I was thinking not so much of the water running off the end of my nose as of what Sinclair could do with their latest product, the Black Watch.

The Black Watch is a $50 digital wristwatch that you can buy for $29.95 if you're willing to build it yourself. There was a full page ad for it in the December 1975 issue of Popular Mechanics. In the ad the watch looks like instant Stanley Kubrick, I mean, I doubt if you'll be able to get into 2001 without one.

Lisa always laughs at me when I decide to build things. I don't hunt, fish, have a dog, smoke a pipe, or own a car, or have a basement or a workroom in the basement. So occasionally I buy do-it-yourself electronics kits and do them myself. The tv tester kit I bought from Eico had at least a dozen parts missing. The digital.alarm clock kit I bought from Heath quit working after six months. The scientific calculator kit I bought from Sinclair worked real well — that was why I was delighted when I saw the ad for the Sinclair Black Watch.

Sinclair is a hip British electronics firm. Not as hip as Quad perhaps, but hip enough. They have long had a line

of Project 80 hi-fi equipment kits that allowed even the poorest little mouse to have a hi-fi system. When pocket calculators happened Sinclair came up With some of the smallest, neatest, best designed calculators — I'd recommend them still as best buys.

They had an offer irt another full page ad about a1 year ago to buy their Scientific-Calculatqr in kit form for $29.95. I did and, as I said above, I amazed myself by putting it together so it worked perfectly.

No\y I awaited the arrival of my Black Watch kit. The illustration was so wonderful —a black steel wrist band with a Square 6f black plastic; you touch the plastic with your finger — no buttons, no visible controls — and the plastic lights up with the time,, hours and minutes and then minutes and seconds.

Well, when my Black Watch finally arrived it was something less than that wonderful illustration. In fact, it was something less than the advertising copy suggested.

The advertisement said in part: "...anybody who can use a soldering iron can assemble a Black Watch with-i out difficulty. From opening the kit to wearing the watch is a couple of hours' work." And at another spot in the ad is "practical — easily built by anyone in an evening's straightforward assembly."

Imagine my surprise when on opening the,kit I found the first instruction was "The component side of the board should be THINLY coated with some of the varnish supplied... Allow the varnish to set (2-4) hours before proceeding."

It seemed to me that however long the rest of the kit took to build, the couple of hours in the ad had already been exceeded.

ft took me about 2 hours do assemble the kit after the varnish took three hours to dry. Then I found another varnish was needed, meaning another 2 hours of waiting. Then, before the case cpuld be put on the watch, there was a period to set the time exactly that stretched ^ over three days — you had to check the watch twice every 24 hours (and don't forget or you have to start all over again) to make sure it's not running fast or slow. So by the end of say four days you could be wearing the watch, hardly the ad's claim: "From opening the kit to wearing the watch is a couple of hours' work."

The ad also says; "All you provide is a fine soldering iron and a pair of cut^ ters." Well, the instructions call for soldering iron, wire cutters, pliers, nonmetallic screwdriver, and bulldog clip.

The instructions themselves are less than clear with the need to guess at the true meaning of some of them and then, if you'r;e right, you can sort of confirm it by the diagrams, of which there are too few — and pot even a schematic to give some clue.

TURN TO PAGE 70.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 36.

» Sq I get about six hours into building the kit and the instructions say take the two batteries supplied and test to see if the thing works. So I did and it didn't work. So I went and got my meter ($100 and not included with the kit) and found that one of the batteries that had been supplied was dead. Which meant I couldn't really find out if I built the thing right or not until I bought another battery.

Which brings me back to standing in the rain. I went to two drugstores ("Sorry, never seen a battery that size.") to one radio & tv supply store ("Sorry, never seen a battery like that"), to a photo store ("Sorry, etc."), to two jewelry stores ("Sorry, etc.") until I found a hi-fi store that had the batteries. The store owner informed me that the only reason he had these bat-, teries was that he just started to stock a certain piece of electronics equipment that ran on them. Now I'm not going to tell you all what that is, I don't want to make it too easy for Sinclair at this point. But if any readers have Black Watches please write and I'll tell you.

It cost me $4.25 for two replacement batteries. You can't buy just one. Thanks Sinclair, I loved the walk in the rain, and I don't mind spending the extra $4.25 for the batteries or the fact that the steel watchband is $4.00 extra (the plastic band that is included if you don't order the extra steel watchband wasn't in my kit so I presume it's re1 moved if you do order the extra steel watchband, whfch is a cheap move). So my kit cost me almost $44 including handling and sales tax. Great.

I finished the watch and put it together. It doesn't work too well. I think the problem is that, the copper foil shield isn't mentioned in the regular instructions but comes with a separate instruction sheet that begins "Set the timmer as described in Adjustment" and ends that you should do everything on the instruction sheet "before adjustment."

The watch is also pretty cheap looking. It's not really a watch, it's a pocket calculator that tells time and doesn't add, subtract, or multiply. It is definitely the future of cheap watches since it's all plastic almost. The Sinclair ad leads you to believe that there are only four (important) parts to the watch, which may surprise, you when you discover the kit contains about 25 pieces of this and that. Sinclair rriay think it's a Black Watch kit, but mine came out a black plastic Lemon,