Ended up using a pair of old car speakers. Was surprised how well they sound. Saves me from buying a Jensen or Celestion speaker, though I might still do so in the future.
Spent most of the day making up a cabinet for my new tube amp. It's not quite done, but it will do for the Toronto Maker Festival. Still have to put on the leatherette covering.
Ended up using a pair of old car speakers. Was surprised how well they sound. Saves me from buying a Jensen or Celestion speaker, though I might still do so in the future.
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AX84 Guitar Amp Build - Success! Worked on the first go. Now all I need to do is make a nice cabinet for it.
Today I started assembling the turret circuit board and wiring up the components on the chassis. Had a hard time obtaining a piece of garolite, so I used a thick piece of circuit board and removed the copper surrounding the holes for the turrets. Even finding turrets was difficult. Eventual I found some at A1 Electronics in Mississauga, ON.
The wiring up of my amp is taking a lot longer than I would have thought. Likely I am going to have to work on it all throughout the week if I am going to have it ready in time for the Toronto Maker Festival this weekend. Did quite a bit of work on my guitar amp today, though it doesn't look like it from the picture. After locating a suitable board, I laid out, drilled and swaged in approximately 50 turrets. Various electronic components (resistors, capacitors etc.) get soldered to these. I had to make up a tool to swage them in. This is where my lathe came in handy. After making up the tool, I used the drill press to swage them in.
Tomorrow will be a soldering day. With any luck, I should be able to hook it up to the guitar and start making some sounds, before the weekend is up! This week I finally got around to building my tube amp for electric guitar. Here are some pictures of the progress so far. A few weeks ago I started work on building a one tube regenerative receiver based on a circuit described in an old book called "The Boy's First Book of Radio and Electronics".
I had first encountered this book when I was a teenager. For years I wanted to build some of the projects within it, but for the most part, many of the parts were impossible to get back in the 1980s. Fortunately, since the advent of eBay, it is now possible to obtain just about everything. For this project I needed tube sockets, a 6BF6 tube, 2.5 mH choke, plug-in radio coil form and a few other parts that would have been difficult (if not impossible) to obtain when I was a teen. Here are some photos of the radio so far. I decided to take a break from the HF1E engine. I can get it to fire every once in awhile, but not consistently or strong enough to keep it going. One thing I will try is to redo my oiler once again. I think the gas droplets are too large still.
In the meantime I decided to turn to a series of old, but good books from the 1950's and 1960's on radio and electronics. For me, It all started with Alfred P. Morgan's The Boy's Second Book of Radio and Electronics. My mother bought me a copy back when I was in high school. I had seen the series before in the library, so I was familiar with the sorts of projects in them. The problem with these books were that they were quite dated by the 1980's. It was very difficult to get a hold of some of the components used in the various projects. Even something as simple as Fahnstock clips were nearly impossible to find, never mind 67.5 volt batteries! Certainly Radio Shack (my primary source of electronics) did not sell them. Still, I loved to build some of these projects someday. Now, in the days of eBay, once again, it is possible to obtain some of these previously unobtainable components. So, I decided to try and build a Morgan 1 tube regenerative receiver featured in The Boy's First Book of Radio and Electronics. So stay tuned as this project progresses. TV back in the 1970s wasn’t like TV today. We only got two (English) channels in those days and more often than not, shows I liked to watch would get preempted by “A Special Presentation”. It was on one of these days, when I was about 10 or 11 that I found myself with nothing interesting to do. I decided to pull some books off of my dad's bookshelf at random and started reading. My dad had a set of three electronics books from Howard W. Sams. These were "99 Electronic Projects", "5 Minute Electronic Projects" and "How to Build Electronic Projects". As luck would have it, it was these I pulled that day. I am not sure why my dad bought these books, because as far as I know, he never got into electronics. After an afternoon's read, I managed to memorize all the schematic symbols and after that, I was hooked. I could not wait to get cracking on building my first electronic project. These three books kindled my interest in electronics, a hobby I still enjoy very much.
Today I think I hit the mother load in terms of old radio documentation. The site is called www.americanradiohistory.com, and they have all sorts of early radio magazines in PDF form posted. Everything from "Electrical Experimenter" to "Radio Craft" and many others. If you are an antique radio junkie like myself, then check it out.
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AuthorCharles Baetsen holds a Bachelor and a Master's degree in Engineering Physics from McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. Archives
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