The Amp Garage

Got a little more done. I wired up the tubes to the preamp board and ran the power supply wires to their apprpriate locations... lemme know if you see something that looks wrong... Now I am figuring out what tonestack I think will work best... as I run the various options on Duncan's Tone Stack Calc...

Here is the latest effort... I mounted up all the parts onto the preamp board. Of course it took longer than it should have but generally pleased with these new boards. This is the first time I've built directly on the board without using any turrets... so far I like it. There is definitely a minimu...

welcome...

In my experience, if the amp is looking for 8 ohms and sees something less then I get a little more nervous than I would if it was looking for 8 ohms and it actually saw something slightly greater. There are statistics and logic that back that up but generally speaking your output transformer health...

I wired up the power supply and finished off the power tube wiring. I also had a request to add a master volume so I went ahead and punched out the chassis for that. This amp is going into a cabinet that was previously used for an Express and the owner is going to reuse the old faceplate. So I am go...

I took this a little further today... my 2nd favorite part of amp building, the heater filament wiring. I have been playing with a few different strategies for doing heater wiring. In this case I run one set of leads then switch wire colors and run the 2nd set. Happy to have this task done and getti...

I really like 5879 tubes. I think they sound absolutely fantastic. However, the first batch that I've worked with all seem to have a little random noise in them. Nothing really bad but in a quiet moment I hear a little noise and an occasional pop... it's happened in three different amps so far and a...

That looks great Bob. So 200R is enough to bias those KT66's? That's what I used on the Rockster amps and it worked well for me... I'll do the math and see is I have it in a good spot or just lucky it didn't melt down on me. Cathode biasing is very forgiving you know. I like the KT66's because they...

Hello All, I wasn't sure where to put this post since I am probably going to equally offend the Dumble and Trainwreck faithful so I went for the crowd that tends to be more experimental and chose to put it here in the Technical Discussion section. I had a customer ask me about a simple but great sou...

Hello All, I am putting together another Rocket build for somebody else. I'm not really bringing much to the table that is going to be new except a bit of an updated power transformer. I had Pacific wind some 120/240 mains Wreck transformers with a 5V rectifier tap. The OT is a Heyboer HTS-8093-1 Dy...

Guy, I'll need to look at it a bit more closely, but if I just add that 40 Ohm value into the spreadsheet I used to calculate things it goes in the direction you like... at this point I don't see a down side to it.

Guy, I suppose the fair answer is no, not really. You can drop it down to a very low level, but my design sorta stops before you get to that ultra low level that most wives, kids, and neighbors really appreciate. You are probably familiar with the non-linear characteristics of audio sound and know t...

You could get a heavy duty 3 way from Mouser or Mojo or whoever - the same as many of us use for impedance switches. They are made to handle the current you are talking about.... however, you would have a momentary open circuit as you switch because this is a "break before make" switch. You might wa...

Nice build... thanks for posting that up for us to get a look at. Building in an attenuator is not too difficult and has turned out to be one of the cooler features I've added to a Wreck. I use an internal rheostat but have the load resistors on the outside of the chassis. Yes, that is a reverse ima...

I have a few of these being field tested and so far nothing but good news. Mine are all in smaller amps than you are talking about here... 35 to 45 watts. In my most recent implementation I have added a bypass switch so that you can send 100% of the power to a speaker if that is your preference.
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