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!