Restoration of 1942 Vibroplex Bug, Part 1
Intro
As I am more and more falling in love with radiotelegraphy (CW), naturally, as a byproduct of this interest, I am falling deeper and deeper into this CW rabbit hole. I knew that there is some CW thing, that is called a “bug”, but I have never paid too much attention what it really is, until I started operating CW. But as I am ocassionally watching other operator’s Youtube videos, I have found that this “bug” thing, and that you look dope and awesome when you operate it.
So I digged a little bit more, and found out, that I need this device so much 😂 In general, I am pretty impressed by an ingenuity of our ancestors and some of the ideas they brought to life, turning out to be a timeless things.
That’s why I admire, for example, old vinyl records, mechanical watches and also, of course, the telegraphy itself. So when I found out that there is an old, mechanical, semi-automatic device for sending morse code? Boy, I was hooked!
The Search
I did a little bit of research on the web and discovered, that the Vibroplex company is recognized as the oldest company in the field and the most iconic “bug” manufacturer. That meant that I needed a Vibroplex, the original real deal.
I have found that you can buy a new Vibroplex bug key even today, which is pretty impressive, given the fact that the Vibroplex company was established on 1905 and is still alive today in 2026, considering how niche the radiotelegraphy is.
But I have watched some Youtube video with comaprison of the oldschool bug and the newschool bug and the guy was suggesting, that the new bugs are probably not the best quality as the old bugs are.
Since I like old things, I thought that buying a new key would be too easy. So I looked around, if there is somebody in Czech Republic selling maybe a second-hand bug, but no avail. So I went to an eBay.com to look around and found out that there is plenty of them in various conditions and having various prices. I have selected one auction that looked good in pictures and even set up an automatic bidding tool to help me in the end of the auction, however, I did not win the auction, because the auto-bid tool hit my max price limit that I wanted to pay. I was sad, but what can you do!
About 3 weeks has passed, and I came back to see what new listings are there and found a new favorite that was for quite good price and looked quite good on photos. However, since I had no prior experience with Vibroplex bugs, I could not really judge if there is some part missing or not. The seller mentioned one missing screw on the weight that is used to set the speed, but other than that, it looked good to me. It was also a “Buy now” with fixed price, so no auction (which I do not like anyway), which is cool. So after some little thinking, I pulled the trigger and bought the item, even though the shipping price was about 1/3 of the key’s price. This is because the item is located in USA and I am in Europe - Czech Republic.