JapanAxe

The good news: I finished putting it all together and applied all the labels. The bad news. When I powered it up and took it out of Standby, the mains and HT fuses both blew immediately! I need to get stuff ready for this weekend’s gigs so I won’t have time to look at the amp for a couple of days but I expect it will be blindingly obvious when I open it up…

And a decibel is a decibel!

Are all 1,200 of those watts Trace Elliot watts?

Thank you! My weekend started just now so I put a piece of cardboard on top on my One 10 and placed the head on that. Plugged in, it is plenty loud for my little practice room with the volume set at about 2/3 of maximum. At full volume it breaks up when pushed, but at that point there are quite a lot of items in the room vibrating! The tone controls are very responsive, with plenty of plummy bass and crisp treble on tap. The tonal differences between my 3 bass guitars really stand out, and it copes with a low B without breaking a sweat. There is a little bit of crackle from the treble control, which is surprising as I bought all the pots new. I will check that there is no DC getting through to it. The slight buzz that I mentioned seems to be at 100Hz rather than 50Hz, which points to noise being picked up from the HT rather than the heaters. I will try moving some leads around with a chopstick to see if that helps.

It lives! Having confirmed that there was continuity everywhere there should be, I turned my attention to finding it where it should not be. I quickly discovered that the wiper of the volume control was connected directly to earth - the culprit was a stray whisker of shielding. Although I had stripped back the shielding and clipped it away (but not completely it seems), the action of sliding some heat-shrink tubing over it had dragged it into contact with the grid stopper resistor feeding the phase inverter. The amp doesn't sound particularly loud through my test speaker (a 10in guitar speaker lying face-down on my work bench - I can't really give it much beans) but that's just to load the output and confirm that the amp is working - experience tells me it will be a different story through my BF One 10, but that will have to wait for now. There is a little bit of buzz that disappears when the volume control is maxed, but I can deal with that at my leisure. I think my transformer purchase goof may have been a happy accident. Running the amp at full wall voltage (249V today) the HT voltages are only 7-9% below the Heritage spec. If I had fitted a 360-0-360V PT they would have been way above spec. Plate dissipation is now 21.7W in each 6L6. This is 72% of maximum, and perfectly fine for a cathode biased amp. The 10W bias resistor gets pretty hot considering it's only burning off 3.7W! I have been lucky with my guess about the PT secondaries i.e. the NFB resistor is not creating scary positive feedback. I still have to fit the feet to the base plate and make sure they don't foul any of the electronics. I'll do this and fit the base plate before I sit it on my One 10. Watch this space!

Yep, just a matter of working through it until I find the issue(s). I've done this enough times not to be worried about it. I could always add a silicon rectifier as an option but tbh I don't really think it will be an issue.

Well that was interesting! The mains transformer I bought and installed is not the one I intended to get - it has a secondary of 300-0-300V at 200mA, whereas I meant to buy one that gives 360-0-360V at 400mA. I discovered my error when I checked the B+ voltages, which are about 10% down on what I expected. I used this online calculator to confirm that 200mA should be more than adequate for this amp with a 300V supply voltage - if it gets a bit squashy and saggy, no problem, this is for home use after all. Otherwise I'll have to drop another £120 on a PT that weighs 1.6kg more than the present one! Plate dissipation in each 6L6 is 20W, or 67% of max - that should be fine. With all valves fitted, there is a buzz at the output through my bench speaker but no signal is getting through. I noticed a bad solder joint at the 4ohm speaker output to which the NFB resistor is connected but fixing that made no difference. The 6SL7 preamp valves are the only ones I couldn't test, but I bought them as tested and working, the filaments light up, and swapping them round did not change anything, so I think there's still a wiring error in there for me to find. I've got a busy weekend of gigs and a rehearsal coming up and I need to do some practice, so I'll have to leave it for tonight. In the meantime, here's the mighty valve line-up:

Only if my building goes on fire.

All the heaters are wired up now. Those pink and purple wires sit well above the audio connections to the valve sockets. I have elevated the heater centre tap by connecting it to the cathodes of the output valves - as I understand it (see Blencowe 3.17), this creates a DC leakage current that is saturated, and consequently unaffected by any AC component from the heaters. All the other bits are now fitted. Time to fire up and plug in - NOT. I'll put this aside and come back to it tomorrow, when I'll check all my connections against the schematic and layout, both visually and with a meter, before running through a staged start-up sequence. I may change my mind about the knobs - I've already done so several times!

As of last night, all the connections are now made apart form the 6.3V heater supply. The stray white wire is the heater centre tap.

I’d be interested to try a TE head into my Super Twin although I’m not a fan of graphics EQs.

Today I made more connections from the transformers to the panel-mounted hardware, added the remaining resistors to the valve sockets, and installed the eyelet board. I ran a copper bus through all the speaker ground connections to make it harder for them to work loose. I have to remember to run another cable from this to the main ground bus, otherwise there will be no ground reference for the NFB circuit. My box of bits is now looking somewhat empty - valves, knobs, feet, fuses, pilot bulb, and a few screws.

Yep, done that one - only scared myself though!

I'm always a bit fearful that, when I do my pre-checks and plug an instrument in, I'll be greeted by a tsunami of humming and buzzing.

I have now fitted both transformers and made the connections for the mains and HT. The OT primaries are above the chassis at present as they will pass through at a different point.

This is the fun part!

I've now installed the input jack, screened cables, and tone stack board.

Sorry, I would draw the line at the Scottish bagpipes! Quite fond of the Uillean pipes though.

Only joking! Over the years I have warmed to the sound of the accordion.

At this point it was obvious nothing good was going to happen.

The money laundering thing happens on Amazon as well. Someone lists a really boring book on, say, the statistics of left-handed spigot trunnions, for a way higher price than any genuine buyer would pay. The transaction is used to send criminal funds, making them look like a legitimate purchase. Alternatively, the seller is just inviting offers and doesn't want to put too low a ceiling on these.

And I think I know who that is too...

Yes, I've met him. I'm on guitar at an open mic, sax player turns to me to take a solo, during which he continues to honk away at full volume. Of course this was a fun event, no paying punters, but the same guy is known locally for his inability to stfu on his sax.

Personally I’ve had more grief with guitarists who don’t understand how music works, e.g.: - Assuming the first chord of a song is its key; - Coming in in the wrong place e.g. starting the lead part of Apache on beat 1 instead of beat 2; - Adding the sus4 to a D chord (easy move for the LH pinky) regardless of musical context; - Inappropriate use of the blues scale (and I do mean scale, played up then down); - Inability to stop playing in breakdowns (or indeed at all). I could go one but I think that’s depressing enough!

I re-checked my layout this afternoon and found a couple of silly mistakes (plus another after I took the photo). After that I had a bit of a solder session and finished populating both eyelet boards, as well as fitting most of the flying leads, except the connections to the ground bus, which will be made with the boards in place. It's always worth checking component values on a meter before installing them - I found a stray 1ohm resistor in my 220k bag!