Bagged and Tagged

 Meant to write this yesterday, but didn't get round to it as, well, tedious tasks don't leave you buzzing afterwards...

So, what is this monotonous task devoid of all traces of Joy you may ask? Well, (un)interestingly enough, it's the prep phase of labeling everything you excitedly unpacked from a few boxes that some nice people presented to you on your doorstep, the items in question being a mouser, tube town and tube amp doctor order orders!

So, with one chassis filled with bags it's time for another really boring bit. Boring, but it will save mini meltdowns, tools being thrown across the room and swearing that'd make a whore blush at a later stage. It is time to bag and tag all the parts, and cross reference them against what you wanted in the first place.

Yes, it is tedious, yes it soaks up the best part of an evening, but from experience last time, it was a useful exercise and helps when it comes to actually building the amp.

Much like last time, process is simple and mind numbing:

- grab a bag

- see what's in it

- cross reference against the build BOM (bill of materials)

- tick off the bits you have

 

Usefully I seem to have everything now bar one order of capacitors that mouser didn't have, and had to be procured from ebay, so they could turn up like, whenever/any time, but they should turn up, otherwise it'll just end up adding a delay as I'll need to source them elsewhere.

Rather disappointingly though, I did notice a few mistakes that I need to rectify. The first of these being that I couldn't find the trim pot I wanted for the bias adjustment, and ordered another one. I really should have checked dimensions, as it turns out the pots i got are like trim pots for ants (zoolander style) and useless for this. Luckily though, i seem to have ordered an extra 25k pot, so I'll end up mounting that through the chassis. Probably a better solution, as it'll allow tube biasing without taking out the whole chassis, at least I hope it will... In any case as you can see, pot is way too small for the black board I am using. However, it does fit the Russian board I have spare, but I am not using that one for this build. When I use the Russian board, I'll be able to use it, or I'll find something else it is useful for, so they won't go to waste. Moral of the story? Look at dimensions of what you're ordering. Second moral of this tale: small trim pots for amp builds are nowhere near as funny as the stone henge stage prop in Spinal Tap.

Another fail was ordering the same switch 5 times instead of twice. Spares, I hear you cry, hoping to find a silver lining. Alas, numbnuts over here didn't see the different product codes when ordering at 1am, and should have ordered 2 + 3 other switches with 2 changed letters/numbers. This means I most likely will have to go and do a small top up order now, which is highly annoying. On the other hand, I need some 20V zener diodes for the modified fat/c45/sat board, so not all bad, and probably need some small other bits as well. Just annoying, that's all...

Talking of which, the Russian supplier of many things sent me a modded board. Along with the friendman be100 saturation circuit, he's done it so it'll take a 3 way DPDT switch, allowing me to add a different clipping style to the amp. So I get to either go 20V zener diodes, or red leds, or, well, whatever diode clipping I want to try. This should be cool. Luckily, also, one of the aforementioned numbnut orders too many switches switches should be usable for this, so, a slight silver lining there...

Anyway, boring task completed, the next step will be to actually do some actual work on the amp, and actually get started with stuff I can take pictures of and that you, dear reader, might actually care about rather than this boring admin Karen level drivel... 

I'll leave with a pictures of the final BOM with everything bar 2 or 3 bits all ticked off showing I have all the bits (almost) I need to start the build

Next time it'll be more interesting. I'll actually be doing stuff