Little sister - Once I finished the Ampeg build, I knew I was getting there. The tube thang was in my blood now, and I was possessed with a sick geek obsession to build another amp, but what? A lot of players that....
The hunt - I'd been lurking about on 18watt.com, seeking comfort in knowing that I wasn't the only poor guy out there spending way too much time thinking about capacitors and layouts and transformers and stuff that would get me a sideways glance....
The donor - I knew I could find all the parts for the build in Taiwan except the chassis, so I focused on this first. I asked around a bunch of custom builders from Malaysia to Texas if they could make a chassis/board....
The chop shop - ...what if I just chopped this up a bit? That put me in a good mood again, but I knew if I got the old hacksaw out I'd do exactly that - hack it up, so I jumped in the....
Where you going to put the tubes? - Mr. Wang was pretty happy there were extra hands around his shop, and assigned Xiao Lio and I to wire up someone's receiver, which we dutifully did while we chatted about what kind of tubes were going to go into....
The little sister comes of age - Once the chassis holes were drilled, it was a pretty simple matter of shoving everything in there and hoping it would all fit. Some builders had complained of noise and squeals and hiss and buzzing because of bad layouts. I....