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 thought I'd turn all that on it's head and wire it up point to point like a rat's nest and see what would happen. Worse thing that could happen was I'd have to do it again.

Check out those beautiful orange caps. They've got to be 40 years old. Mr. Wang pulled them off of a junked tuner, and donated them to the project. My wiring work was given a D+ by Xiao Lio and Professor Chang (this snarly old professor of engineering at the local University who lectures on radio tubes and likes to get in arguments about tube specs with anyone who will listen) who shook his head and sighed that he was embarrassed to see such shoddy work. "You young people are so sloppy," he reminded.

Here's a view of the tubes.

And what it all looks like from back.

After all the wiring work, I slapped on what seemed like a reasonable amount of power for the PT, and dug around for the crappiest OT from an old tuner I could find in the shop, figuring it would drive the tubes just fine. If not, I'd tinker with the flow later.

Once it all got in there, I went to my favorite speaker maker, Mr. Chen, and asked him if he had any good used 12" PA speakers. He climbed over some junk and came up with a few decent looking samples, and I plugged them in to check the sound with a guitar. ii wasn't happy with the clarity, so rather than dig around some more Mr. Chen sat down, grabbed some cone paper and coned up a speaker on the spot, and said I'd maybe get about 90dB efficiency out of it. I paid him $10 and took it home to try one it dried.

Damn, it was LOUD, and clrunchy, and clear, and everything I could possibly imagine from a Frankenstein amp monster, and it didn't squeal, hiss, or do anything weird.

It had to match the whole fuzz thing I'd started, so I went with a grey cardigan look (y'know, being from the 50's and all) and found some sort of argyle looking gold cover for the speaker grill.

Here it is, folks. Straight off the junk line...

Finally, to further frustrate the frustrated guitarists who played at my club, I added knobs with no markings at all, so that guys would actually have to listen to figure out how to set the amp. What a concept.

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