NZGuitars.com : Filling you with GAS since 2003

I've never done the glossy paper as toner trick with copiers, I still just use sharpies to draw on the copper, but I do love using muriatic acid (hydrochloric) and hydrogen peroxide... though I must get a bubbler together to get into the cupric stage so nothings wasted. Both are "past participl...

I saw an idea on the bench... how come it's now outside in the gutter?

Ah, nothing useful to add so lets get crude and see if bad jokes will replace our notions of retaining self esteem.

Selling it unmodded is possibly a better idea than selling it modded because these old amps are getting silly prices and making it hard for people who want them, and understand the technology, to buy cheap, mod and tweak up and get them back into musicians hands who could use them for what they were...

Anything thats hard wearing would do the job as it's only really there so you don't have to see the wood underneath and I personally would like to see a little creativity applied to such a task beyond what fender did back in the fifties. Denim would work, as would any cotton drill fabric, but left u...

Alnicos always good. The magnetic fields it generates seems to be alot more peaky in the audio range than ferrite which tends to be flatter and, to my ears anyways, kinda dull because it's so responsive. The Alnico also tends to have that ability to get kinda bleary when saturated which is good to. ...

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y115/quickkiwi/blogtown/tbampfini.jpg As you can see in this photo I've got a few different styles going on. The power supply stuff is PTP on a tag strip and the preamp is a version of PCB kinda based on turret board. Number one I can change out caps and resistors r...

I looked up a schematic of the blues juniour and they're running 330 volts on the plates plus -10 to the grids for a total of 340 so maybe I'll go for about 350 and cathode biased. Who knows... first I gotta bend aluminium and do a rough layout... figuring out the fine details can come later! Starti...

Tubeswell, I'm not really a fan of big power dropping resistors and I don't have a 5V winding on the PT to drop in a tbe rectifier, but if I was to drop the voltage first I'd most probably have zeners on the CT but I like my little trick of using a small signal type cap on the front of a choke as yo...

Get your PT off an old radio. Small ones have little SE amps so they'll give you the power you need.

I'd say mine was from the sixties, late or maybe even the late seventies. 6.6k cool! I've got a 325-0-325 there and some big chokes so maybe a choke input with a .22 - 1uf just off the diodes to pull up the voltage over .7 of AC.

I haven't as yet gone into it properly as I'm still trying to sort out the signal input into it. I know it's pretty straight forwards as theres just the two triode grids on the ECL86's to track back from but they did some weird stuff on these old grams. It is indeed two single ended amps but it's al...

Well the basic premise is that the output transformer converts high voltage and low current into low voltage and high current... so that the tubes, at maybe 5000 ohms resistance, can drive a speaker of 8 ohms resistance. But if you make a speaker with super fine wire, like a guitar pickups, and lots...

Theres no hard and fast rules and why not see the advantage of each and use it where appropriate. Manufacturers do what they do because they have to balance off assembly costs against durability. Point to point is very expensive compared to all the others so manufacturers don't do it... unless your ...

On the matter of chokes could we just use the 240V winding on say a 240/12V 1A transformer? 1A divided by 20 is 50mA so the current ability is there but do things like this have the inductance we'ed require to remove some ripple. After all it's not like a choke input where we're using the choke alon...

I just picked up an old phillips radiogram for 65 bucks that works well and I had pulled one of the output tubes while it was in the shop and it was an ECL86... there were what looked like a quad so I bought it even though I couldn't see any OT's... there aren't any! I've only just pulled it out of ...