Soldering the power board

I decided to tackle the power board first, mainly as it has less components, and also to test out the new soldering iron. All in all pretty good going.

Best cool little tool for OCD ever

I used the wire bending tool to nicely bend the legs on the diodes and most of the resistors, apart from 2, where the board was obviously designed for larger fatter ones, so I kind of had to just have them with long legs. Not the nicest aesthetically, but it just needs to work at the end of the day, and it's not like you'll be able to see it once the amp is in it's headshell anyway, even if I do want everything to look neat tidy and pretty as a matter of personal pride.

Printout with components drawn on

Anyway, so I started off with the printout of the mirror image of the PCB, this to be able to draw the components on first, along with the component names, this way (seeing as the board I have is unmarked) I could refer to it whilst wiring, and also so I could grab the bags of components I previously labelled (in one of the previously described mind numbingly boring steps of preparation) and solder them on.

Going from Tony's advice I started with the shortest components first, ie the ones that will have the least height when soldered on. This makes it easier to solder on the reverse and to stop bits falling out as they're resting against the table. Makes life easier. From there moved onto the diodes, then the smaller caps and finally the 6 large ones, of which 3 needed to be mounted on the reverse side of the board.

As the PCB is meant for longer axial capacitors I was left with the dilemma of "long bit of bare wire" that I didn't like, so I cut heat shrink tubing to cover each leg to length, and then mounted the top ones. The soldered. Finally I mounted the three at the bottom.

Now as the three at the bottom were running across tracks, I was a bit paranoid after doing them, so decided to see if some cable ties would fit under them, to stop them making any contact with the tracks on that side of the board. Happily they did, and so 4 cable ties later (1 wasn't long enough to go round them all, so had to elongate by using a second, and I wanted 2 for symmetry, hence 4) problem solved (even though it is being overly cautious). Then, for looks and completionism (and probably OCD) I went and did the ones on the reverse side of the board.

Spot the glaring mistake...

Next, I went to do a test mount of the board. At which point I noticed the standoffs (20mm) meant for the power board were not going to work. Also the 40mm ones of which I had spare, they were too tall. All this because of the caps mounted on both sides. Disaster!

Then i remembered the bag of parts I'd ordered on a whim from ampbuilder which had some small (i guess 10mm) standoffs that I thought were useless. These combined with the 20mm ones actually turned out to be exactly the right height, and test fitting the board left enough clearance on both sides.Result! And also a victory for hoarding and not deciding to throw the "useless" stuff away. Not that that's a good thing reinforcing my hoarding instinct...

Reverse of the board

Mistake rectified

And then, then I looked at the board and though"that looks a bit bare and empty" and suddenly realised I'd completely forgotten to put one of the caps on. I can only imagine the embarrassment of going "why doesn't it work" later down the line, to discover something that stupid at fault.

Anyway, removed the board, put the missing capacitor on (pretty big one to miss as well...) and all was well with the world.

All in all, pretty pleased with the result. I've also come across a nice picture of an elevated heater mod, but more on that when i get down to doing the what seems painstaking work of wiring up the heaters and other fun rails across the tube sockets...

Oh yeah, also videod it, but I'll probably do the next time lapse video in with that of the preamp board, which is the enxt mission as I am not going to do any chassis wiring until I've got the transformers.

All coming along nicely! I can see this being addictive...

Finished article in the chassis