The Amp Garage

I assume you've got filament voltage tied to pins 3 and 4 on the rectifier. With nothing connected to pin 7, it may be hard to get a good reading of the voltage. Go ahead and temp in a filter cap and bleeder resistor (470k/1W) from pin 7 to ground and see if you can get a reading that way. With this...

Those caps are fine. You could certainly try Mallory's (yellow tubular) or Orange Drops, but I believe the biggest difference you will hear is by tweaking the values of the caps, not the type. You often see .02uF for the mid cap, so that might be a place to tinker. .01 is going to move the mid notch...

I would be tempted to isolate the heater ground/return from audio ground. That is, keep that ground branch entering from the left feeding the heaters only. Take the audio grounds over to that branch originating from the right side. Also, I don't see any filtering on the output of the regulator, alth...

I like the Weber Sig12B. Great all-around speaker. As noted, RWB is a good choice as well.

Wow, I must have found an older version of the page. Note that "technical" is spelled incorrectly in the link I provided. Curious.....

Definitely check out RDH3 and 4 (Radiotron Designers Handbook). They are regarded as the "bible" of tube circuit design and operation for many people.

Lots of good stuff online here:

http://www.pmillett.com/tecnical_books_online.htm

Should keep a person busy for a while....

I generally get stuff from Doug Hoffman at www.hoffmanamps.com. He sells good quality parts at reasonable prices and ships faster than anyone in the biz. Closed now for the holidays, but you can still put together your order and he'll get right on it as soon as he reopens.

Yes, they are rated maximum values. Yes, you can use higher voltage rated caps, but physical size can become a problem.

First of all, welcome! I think I would go: EF86 --> CF --> tone stack --> volume pot --> recovery stage This will give you a chance to keep from overloading the recovery stage and also save you a coupling cap. As long as the EF86 is biased at a reasonable point (plate at about 1/3 to 1/2 of B+ for t...

What method are you using to measure the idle current in the output tubes? From your description, it sounds like you are biased very cold. Not sure what's going on with V1 and V2.

Like ampgeek said, post all voltages for all pins.

Yes, it will. Put it on top of the pot. Maybe try 470k resistor into 500k pot, or 680k into a 250k pot.

You basically won't have any real "clean" settings with the lead channel only. Have you considered a variant on the Marshall 2203/4 circuit? That one cleans up nicely, but still has a good bit of drive. Not as heavy and saturated as a SLO, so if that's what you're going for, you'd have to add pedals...

Be sure and check out the '80's Yamaha SBG/SG-2000/3000 series as well. Amazing guitars.

Because of the way the intensity pot ties into the vibrato channel signal on the AB763, the mix resistors have to come after coupling caps. In your case, however, you could have your mix resistors coming directly off your plates feeding the PI input cap.