Hello, steemians! Welcome to my page, eh!
With this cold blast that we've been having this week, I haven't had any desire to go out of the house for anything. I decided that as long as I was stuck in the house, I might as well work on a few of my tube amp projects. I haven't had much ambition to work on these projects for a while because of other distractions, but this week seemed like a good time to get back into them.
The first thing I decided to do was to finally get around to putting a power indicator light into the front of my little home made 10 watt amp. I built this amp several years ago, but forgot to put a power light in it at that time. It wasn't very hard, I just had to figure out where to put it and then drill a hole for it. Since I used a green LED for the indicator, the hole didn't have to be very big. I mounted a short parts mounting strip behind the hole to have a place to connect the LED wires, the load resistor, and the wires from the heater circuit. Pretty basic stuff... you can see the little green LED sticking out of the face of the amp next to the power switch.
The next amp I worked on was my little "Red and Black" amp that I built last year. I made a mistake when I wired up the volume controls, one of them was wired backwards, so it had to be turned the wrong way to turn it up. A simple mistake, but I wanted to fix it so that it would work the way it's supposed to.
Here's the amp. The flash doesn't do much for the colors...
The underside of the amp.
If you would like to read more about the building of this amp, just follow this link. This post is from about 5 months ago.
https://steemit.com/guitaramp-build/@amberyooper/a-new-guitar-amp-build-part-3
I also decided to get back into this amp that's been sitting on the edge of the workbench for several months now, waiting for me to get back to it. This is another amp that I built, using the chassis from an old commercial PA amp. I had the amp working, but I wasn't satisfied with it's lack of power due to the the power supply voltage being fairly low for these power tubes. I had replaced the power transformer with a higher voltage transformer, but had not finished wiring it in. I still had 2 circuits to finish up, the AC power in to the power switch and transformer primary side, and the negative bias circuit for the power tubes. I managed to get most of that done last weekend, but I still need to install the power indicator light, which I don't have right now.
This last amp should be about 30 to 35 watts output, but with the lower voltage of the previous power transformer, I probably wasn't getting more than about 20 watts. This is supposed to be an experimental bass guitar amp, it should carry the low notes better than a guitar amp would because the output transformer is larger than necessary. I guess I'll know when I test it.
That's all I have for this post, I hope you found it interesting!
Thanks for stopping by my page and checking out my post, eh!
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Very cool... I always like your tube amp posts !!
Thank you!
That red and black amp is super-cool looking. Is the design based on any other amps or is it an Amber original?
Well, the preamp circuits in it are a pretty typical generic Fender type design. There's really only so many ways to set up basic tone controls. The Marshall and a lot of other amps use variations of the Fender type preamp circuits. The amp that is fundamentally different in it's tone controls is the Ampeg. As for the power output section, there's only a couple of basic ways to set up a single ended output circuit and have it work right.
I guess the closest amp to this one that Fender made was the Champ. I just put in 3 tone controls, a master volume, and a bigger power tube.
Very interesting projects! Looks like good things to keep busy with during this Polar weather!
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