Re: I need a different approach - suggestions please

You called the constructor directly from the 'main()' routine. That means
you called it from the primary thread of the program. You don't know this
yet, probably, unless you've already studied concurrency in Java a little bit.

The problem is that the GUI won't work right if you do that. You have to
move GUI actions onto the "Event Dispatch Thread" (EDT), a background
thread that the system creates to handle all GUI actions.

Also, you start all the action from the constructor. That's bad. As its name
implies, a constructor's purpose is to _construct_ an object, not run its logic.
Run the logic after construction completes and the instance is no longer in a
partially-built state.

And make your indentation consistent with the Java coding conventions (available
on line).

So all together, you'd do something like:

  public static void main(String[] arguments) {
     java.awt.EventQueue.invokeAndWait( new Runnable() {
         @Override public void run() {
              CalcGUIQ1 calculator = new CalcGUIQ1();
              calculator.setVisible(true);
          }
      });
  }

The problem is that the GUI won't work right if you do that [make GUI calls
from the main thread]. You have to
move GUI actions onto the "Event Dispatch Thread" (EDT), a background
thread that the system creates to handle all GUI actions.