I was not thinking that pulling the old parts would be a useful thing to do. It's possible, but it's a huge amount of work and you're harvesting parts that are already 50 years old.rooster wrote: are you anticipating that folks will pull the old parts and then stuff the new boards..., or are you thinking that folks will buy new parts and stuff the new boards with new parts? A combination of both new and old parts perhaps? Thanks.
The old saying goes that if Necessity is the mother of invention, Laziness is the father. I'm all for doing things the easy way, and it's much easier to put in new parts than to carefully unsolder the old ones.
With one exception, the full suite of new parts is about $30-40 depending on where you buy them. I did the estimate on buying them in 1s from Mouser. The exception is the inductors used for the MRB effect if your amp has that, and the Tone-X tone controls in the bass preamp.
Those inductors are 0.5H, and the simplest replacement is a wah inductor. Of course, wah inductors are in the $10-30 range themselves. So it makes sense to remove the inductors and save some cash. If the inductors show low DC resistance after you pull them out of the old PCB, they're almost certainly good.
The other parts on the old board are of dubious goodness. The electro caps are probably toast. The carbon comp resistors would add a nice vintage hiss to the sound, but I'm not as fond of that hiss as I used to be. The film caps are probably good, but they're HUGE compared to what you can get today for $0.25 each. The old transistors might be good, but they often go hissy too, and using new ones will be an advantage in getting quiet operations. And of course, the wires are what we're trying to get rid of.
That was my line of reasoning, and so I laid out the board for modern parts, which are usually smaller. It's possible to shoe-horn in the old ones, but the cost in time and frustration is high, and the benefit is dubious, in my opinion.
My idea was that you could take the new PCB, fill it with new parts that make the same circuit as the old schematics so it sounds the same, then just clip out the old board and wires and solder the new board in.