Work Area

[resophonic1]

I'm about to gear up for my first project. What kind of work area do you use for your amp building?

[Icetech]

BIG table, good soldering iron, scope if you can find one... signal generator.. good meter...

I keep my resistors seperated in one of those 30 drawer organizers....

[Normster]

For the last few builds, it's been a Black & Decker Workmate stuffed into a cold damp corner of the garage. Everything else is layed out on an old coffee table. I think I'm gonna upgrade to a 6 foot folding table.

[Tdale]

I'm sure the that term "cold" has a different meaning if you live in California, compared to if you live in Norway

If I had to work in the garage during winter, I'm sure the sound of my amps would be too cold, even for Albert Collins!

Tommy

[Normster]

Yes, I guess "cold" IS quite a bit different at your latitude. Of course, my same cold corner gets pretty hot in the summer.

[Bob-I]

I have a large U shaped desk. One side has all my amp building stuff, 2 30 drawer organizers, soldering station, shelves underneath for storing the meter function generator and scope. That's where I do my soldering and testing. I have a small workbench in the garage with a drill press and vise for drilling out chassis and boards.

[jimipage]

My shop is in a bedroom in the far corner of the house -- cold in the winter, hot in the summer. At least I have nice shade trees and a portable heater. And the daylight is great in there. My workbench is and old 1950's(?) Webcor console stereo. It was left here when we bought the house. Most of the tubes I pulled from it are Mullards, and I found a few spares, too. Haven't yanked the speakers or the transformers out of it yet, but that'll happen in good time. I also have my recording studio in the same room, on an antique 50's laminated steel dining room table.
Yes, it's quite cramped.

[sportster4eva]

Here's my little retreat in the basement. 36" deep and 8' long. Cost about $60 to build. There's a shelf underneath to hold parts n' stuff. The speakers are Dynaco A-25's driven by a Lafayette tube integrated using 6gw8 tubes. Heavenly! The garage is next to this part of downstairs, where the compressor and table saw are.

[KT66]

My workspace started out as my computer music workstation, now it's covered in amp stuff. Does anybody just build one amp and then quit?! Anyways, don't use a metal table or chair for that matter, and use one arm when poking around in it when the juice is on. If your workspace has flourescent lighting, have a lamp with a regular bulb handy so you can turn off the florescents from time to time because they can induce hum. You can make a low cost signal tracer like I did out of an old boom box and some blocking caps. Theres alot of little parts that are good to have handy that you might not think about until you need them like machine screws, aircraft nuts, star washers, rubber grommets for tranny wires, grounding lugs, shrink tubing, loc tite, plastic tie-downs, stabd-offs, terminal strips, etc. Some usefull tools: Nut drivers, solder sucker, chopstix, shop vac, hand drill, center punch, amoung others. Some reference books are good to have on hand too, as well as a whole bunch of shelves with thousands of dollars worth of obscure amp parts that you probably won't use in the next five years if you want your workspace to really look important.

[Tonegeek]

I once made a workbench out of a hollow core door. Cost me 10$ at a salvage building materials place. You can build a frame or use sawhorses to make a table with it.

[Greg Smith]

I've got a tiny room in the basement, next to the furnace. My workbench is a big, battered old oak desk that my neighbour was throwing out. It takes up about 2/3 of the floor space and is covered with projects under way and the leftovers of past projects. From what I've seen, a tidy workspace runs counter to the whole DIY electronics mindset.

Greg

[fred_farkel]

Being new and learning about this stuff I've started assembling my personal work space using one of our bedrooms with the wifes permission.
I picked up a nice solder station (not cheap!), a Beckman meter, got a formica kitchen counter top from the local building supply and build a frame for it so I can sit close and even some small tools, again not cheap. I never realized just how much electronic stuff really cost! Lucky for me the wife is an aerospace electronics technician, she is helping me assemble my tools..plus she sometimes scores scopes and things the cal lab discards!
I have a long ways to go but its been interesting and fun to say the least!

[David Root]

I rent space in a commercial recording studio building, since I have no basement and the spare bedrooms are off-limits, you know how that goes.

I have one 6ft x 2ft bench along the long wall where I do the basic amp assembly. It has my power and preamp tube testers at one end. Once it gets to testing/tweaking, it moves to a 4ft square table which has my pickup winder at one end, a scope and assorted stuff in between and a rubber mat along the other end where said testing/tweaking takes place.

This table also has a 1kVA Variac fed from a Weber isolation buss box, which I use to get 120VAC for testing. The line voltage in the place varies from 118V to 126V unpredictably and frequently. Been thinking about a regulator but probably too much $$.

If it weren't such a simpatico place I'd move to somewhere else because of the line voltage problem. My new builds go in the recording studio where local bands get to try them out, and there is a professional luthier in the building who has been taking care of some of my older & crankier instruments, plus he checks out my builds too.

Tools I could not work without: small very long nose pliers, Plato flush cutters, smallest size visegrips, Weller WES51 soldering station. (One set on each table). Fluke 187 DMM plus a decent LCR meter and an electrolytic cap tester. SAE/metric socket set 1/8 to 1/2 or so. Heat gun. Small flat & Phillips scewdriver sets. Cheapo Harbor Freight 12V hand drill, plus decent AC hand drill. 16" drill press, with Unibits 1/8 to 1 3/8.

[mhuss]

I use a butcher block table top I got at Ikea, mounted on a sturdy home made wood frame. Lots of parts drawers.

--mark

[img:800:600]http://mhuss.com/images/Bench.jpg[/img]

[malt]

I just finish this room, so no I’m getting it organised ,got a used big L shaped office table and made a workbench and put some of the leftover floorboards on topof the bench.