| Chapter 3 - The Grande Finally! | |
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| After a month of hard work (probably pulling 80 hour weeks) I finally ended up with this! :-) I decided to toss out the steel chassis because it looked too plain. I went straight for the best looking and hardest wood I could find at Home Depot - Walnut. The potted boxes are glued together and painted using 1/8th inch thick wood. Fortunately, (for styling sake) the transformers don't even get hot at all. In fact, it runs barely luke warm in this setup. Last but not least, I moved the rectifier tube to be in line with the 300B and 6SN7. After building three chassis for this amp, I learned one thing. Designing the layout from inside out not vice versa was better because if you do it that way, you may get pretty cranky at the end when all the holes are drilled and machined, you may realise and/or overlook that a lot of wires inside maybe crossed in a nasty way that may cause electromagnetic interference. I probably drew 1/2 dozen diagrams before I finalized my third layout. | |
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| The guts were upgraded from Halco/Caddock mix to 100% Caddock resistors for the amp section. The only non-Caddock resistors are the bleeder and filter resistors found in the PSU. I also upgraded the Black Gate CAP for bypassing the cathode resistor (I believe that is the right way to phrase it, correct me if I am wrong) to an even higher-end Black Gate CAP. I dropped the voltage ~30 volts at B+ and less 15ma at the cathode resistor to make the tubes last longer, sacrificing 2-3 watts (see specs for more information). | |
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Conlusion |
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