So.. We Finished the Amp.. kinda : /

After all is said and done we tackled the rest of the components, checked and double checked everything and the moment of truth was upon us!!!

After shielding ourselves and putting in ear plugs, we went ahead and plugged it in!

To our shock, all of the tubes lit up as they should and the amp looked lovely... however, shortly after it began to make a strange noise and did not really function the way that we hoped.

So, off to AudioKarma.org for some advice! In the meanwhile.. look how pretty it is!

If you are curious... keep an eye on the thread at AudioKarma and DiyAudio

Changing up the solder and some real progress is made!

Discovered tonight that a lot of our soldering trouble was coming the type were using. Although we aren't sure of the current brand, it is certainly working a lot better. Melts at lower temp and seems to flow a lot better.

Close up of capacitors.

We feel like some major progress has been made, we counted up the parts that are remaining and found them all on schematic. We should be ready to test and power up within three weeks.

Slow and steady.... that's the pace

Wiring up the transformers

On/On switch?

A bit more progress...

Today we spent another couple of hours wiring.

We were able to get all of the speaker outputs wired up



..about half of the volume control

and the first handful of components in place.

Its actually starting to look like the complex mess that it should look like!

Beginning to wire

Finally, we get to fire up the soldering irons and get to work!

On our first night soldering... we literally spent about 2hrs and got the volume control and one ground wire finished.........



Also, we got all of the speaker output connectors wired up.


We did get more familiar with the schematic and setup a good work flow.

Definitely hoping that it will go a bit quicker from here on out.

Otherwise, this will take us a good handful of months!

Getting started

We started by mounting some of the larger parts to the chassis and dry fitting some of the components.

Not too far in we realized that the transformer covers would not actually fit over the output transformers.. I mean, no matter what ... they are about 1/4" too big!

I contacted the company and they replied something along the lines of...

"Yes, they are too big" and "You need to make them smaller to fit"

After asking for clarity, they replied once again with

"Reduce side covers carefully"

At this point, I kind of gave up on translating the directions.

I found a way to take the transformer apart and there are 2 metal covers that go over the coils.

Once they were removed, the cover had more than enough clearance.




We then mounted the side panels and started to translate the schematic!