all parts orders are arriving monday. time to get to business.

sorry bout the delay

still waiting on parts to arrive

dont worry its coming

lazy monday

well saturday i found a nice old realistic solid state amp. it'll make a good listening amp for the bench and today i built this amp cradle for working inside amp chassis'

dummy load

need a dummy load for test amps... easy 4 high power 8 ohm /50 watt resistors wired in series parallel. and hooked up to an input jack. thats a 2oowatt resistive load. now you can run your freshly built head at full last without damaging your amp or your ears, i'd tell you step by step but its so simple i dont think i need to explain. but i will say this. an aluminum housing is recomended for heat dissapation cause these things do get hot. but sticking with the salvage theme of the tools i used i ended up going with an old drill bit case. the parts are easy to find through mouser dale/vishay high power resistors 80hm/50watt and this is alot cheaper than buying a dummy load.
heres the pics.

capacitance discharge stick

capacitors hold lethal voltages. yeah, it even enough to kill you.
but its easy to discharge them. all you need is some high power resistors hooked to a ground on your amp chassis. and you put them in an insulated something or other. make sure its sealed up. and your done.
all you need is a 250 ohm /2 watt resistor.. this method takes about a minute to bleed the cap. i chose the high power version. three 250 ohm / 2 watt resistors wired in parallel, i used an old sharpie casing to house them the tip from an old mulitimeter probe, and an aligator clip on a length of 18 gauge wire for hooking up to ground. its all insulated and ready to go.

but just a warning. my way of doing it will drain the caps in seconds. but there will be big pops and stuff when you do it from the electricity moving out faster.
heres some pics.

moving right along.

so i just made these for my one month old niece. pretty stoked.
tomorrow i'll start showing you some of the things i'll build that i talked about, where to get the parts, and yadda yadda yadda

punch you in the face. discharging and load dumping among other things.

when testing for faults its good to have a few tools. i'll go through some of them here. fun learning.

1.a common household chopstick is a great little thing to have to prod around inside and amp because its non conductive.... but keep one hand in your pocket. you can find all sorts of little noise issues by pushing things around in your lead dress, tapping on microphonic caps and also microphonic tubes.

2. a discharge tool is absolutely necessary when working inside of amps. you can kill yourself without discharging caps properly. capacitors can store lethal charges for days even months after the amp is shut of.

3. amp stethoscope. this is great for going in your amp and testing out circuits to hear for issues within your signal. you can listen to every point in your amp and clearly hear where things are going wrong.

4. in order to properly use the amp stethoscope you need to run your amp with out a speaker. but this is not safe so for that a load dump is need which is basically a large resistor that takes your amps signal and disposes it properly.

over the next few days i'll post pics. and parts lists and instructions for how to build all of these things so stay tuned and learn a few things!

fuck firebirds... get a prairiefire

just a little something i dreamed up for my self with my friend marty over at prairie custom guitars. check out his site he does some pretty incredible things.
so heres the scoop!
i took a jaguar body and flipped it upside down. added a tele neck.. and tele controls and set it off with a custom styled pickguard.
the plan is a 3 tone sunburst bound body. rose wood body finger board. and some screaming pickups to get some destroying tones.
over and out!

a hobbit hole?

cleaned the little hole where build amps today, seems as though i finally got a purchase order in. so all those amps i was talking about building are actually going to happen.
i also had some stickers made. maybe this blog will actually start serving its purpose again.

and yeah my work space is underneath a loft bed.