Okay, I spent about two hours today finishing up the wiring. I'd been kinda stalled as I was facing wiring the filaments, and I hate wiring filaments. But a little poke from Duhvoodooman got me going again:
Pix here.
I started off by finishing up the filament wiring. It went okay, but it takes a while and is painstaking work. Did I mention I hate wiring filaments?
Next I finished up the power tube socket and preamp tube socket connections. I like these new ceramic sockets, they take solder very well. I got good consistent, clean joints using them. We'll see how well they hold up, I think they are Chinese-made.
Next I wired the input sockets. This amp has the feature of having a single triode input and two triodes in parallel. Kind of like jumpering an old plexi, but the amp is pre-jumpered. One input is the single triode, the other is both in parallel. Two triodes in parallel give a slightly more complex tone due to the differences in the triodes and a little bit more gain.
Then I wired the volume and tone control. The tone control is a lot like the Tweed Princeton control, it is a low loss type that subtracts treble so you get a brighter sound and a less bright sound as you turn the control down. It uses different values for the pot and cap as the 18W is a brighter amp.
Finally, I wired the grounds. I used star grounding in this amp; every grounding node has its own return to the star ground. This is done to prevent ground loops, which introduce noise into the amp. This amp had the most individual grounds I've done: seven total.
This last pic shows the finished wiring.
I'm going to let this sit over night before I give it one finally inspection to make sure all the wiring is correct. Then I'll install the tubes and fire it up. With any luck, it will work the first time and then I can check the bias and basic tone.
Stay tuned.
tung
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Originally Posted by M29
