Massive Work on the Personal Project

The last week of work has been by far the most productive week in terms of understanding, accomplishment, and overall completion. 

The first thing that I had to finish was the fibreboard. At the start of the week, I had most of the capacitors and resistors on it. This was tricky because I had to look at the circuit diagram and then back at the schematic to make sure that I got everything right. The fibreboard traces and wires on the underside of the board were the hardest to do because there were so many holes. It was rather easy to get confused and put a wire in the wrong hole. 

Rafael came over on saturday to make sure that I hadn't done anything potentially damaging or even life threatening. There were 3 main questions that I had for him.

1. How do you know where to put all the cables that come off of the power transformer when some don't show up on the circuit diagram and the schematic. 

2. How and where do I connect the ground bus wire? 

3. How to get to the 6.3 heaters from the power transformer and the pilot light? 

The first question has yet to be answered and I'm going to meet up with him next saturday to clear it up and finish it.

The second question, however, has been solved. The bus needs to be attached in some way shape or form to the ground wire that comes off of the mains outlet and the chassis. The easiest way to do this was to attach both onto a screw and bolt that were conveniently near where the AC mains line comes into the chassis. This prevents the chassis from ever becoming live.

Rafael also pointed out that I had a capacitor between the ground and the live wires which is arbitrary and not suitable for British electrical law. 

The third question I figured out by myself on wikipedia. Each of the tubes needs to have 2 twisted 6.3 heater wire so that they can warm up before being played. The way to do this involved a fun and slightly unorthodox method. Basically, I had to strap two wires in place on the side of a desk and then attach them both to a power drill. By spinning the drill head, the two wires spun around each other tightly so that there would be no hum when the amp is played. I connected these to one of the tubes yesterday, but I'm going to do the rest today.

Finally, I sent an email to my supervisor telling him about the state of the project and my progress so far. I still need to finish up some small components, attack all of the 6.3 volt heater wires, install the fibreboard into the chassis, finish off the wires in the power transformer, and connect the AC mains line. 

I suspect this should be done and tested by Saturday!

 Upper side of the fiberboard

 Fiberboard + the outer capacitors

 The input jacks - Still havent finished those!

 The whole layout

 Chassis!

 Power transformer connections

Fiberboard in massive disarray

Progress - 28 Sept

Although I didn't have a whole lot of time (about an hour and a half...) I thought I made some really significant progress yesterday. The hardest part after finishing the chassis outer components and external hardware was to actually start the soldering and get into it. 

I had to make sure that I had all of the components ready and available. The most difficult bit of this is trying to decipher the circuit diagram and the schematic. At my current level of electronic knowledge, the schematic is too hard to decipher on my own, so I need to use the circuit diagram to help me out as well. I have read however, that the best way to learn how to read schematics is to do and to just jump right in and build. So far after working on the fibreboard  I agree with this. Previously I was terrified of this schematic that didn't make any sense to me. Afterwards, I then started to notice correlations and different things that made sense in the context of real life. Positive and negative directions, different symbols, quantities of various components and wires, etc. Very happy with my progress and although I can't work much today, I'm going to try and do a long session on Saturday to appease this. 

Earlier today, I also met with my supervisor to have a 'check-up' and to to get one of the stock research sheets signed. I explained to him the progress that I've made, plans for the future, and also my own personal optimism towards this project. He asked me some questions, made sure I was doing alright, and asked me how my research was going. I said that it was going according to plan and that I've got a huge sheet of sources that I'm going to put on noodle tools soon. He nodded and signed me off and I felt that this was a productive meeting because it was the first one where I didn't feel that I was slightly underprepared or nervous. 

Below are some pictures of the progress so far. The fibreboard looks a bit empty, but that should change in the days to come. I've also emailed Raphael to possibly have him over to review and oversee my project for a day. Make sure everything is going alright. I'm sure he will be pleased with my progress.

 The whole workspace including the chassis, fibreboard, components, tools, soldering iron, magnification light, etc. The case/house is below the desk in the back, it's barely visible.

 Fibreboard

External Capacitors

Parts Have Arrived

So, today is September the 15th, 2012. I haven't been posting much in a while because there hasn't been that much progress in the last few weeks. This is mainly because after sourcing, finding, and ordering parts, ect, there wasn't much to do. I looked through a lot of books, researched a lot of websites, ect.

Last week, I contacted my Personal Project supervisor, Mr. Weatherley, and he thought I was getting along with the project well with some "delayed production" (which I completely agree with.) Since the parts are here, I'm in the process of unboxing them and taking inventory of all my components. I also have the revised schematic which I'll post below. At some point I need to clear my desk upstairs so that I have some workspace to actually do something, can't do it on a carpet....

A few weeks back, my noodle-tools account wasn't working because the school needed to re-validate it. I lost some sources in the process so I need to go ahead and find them. That won't take too long however because I have well above the required amount of sources for this project.

 Boxes of Parts

 List of parts that came (There's 4 pages!)

 Various components

 The speakers - Jenson, nice quality

Revised Schematic

Chassis above ^

Amped

Amped

So, today I was reading this book called "Amped" that my dad got me about the history of different amplifiers and I came across an interesting page that I wanted to compare with my project. 

This particular page showed the 1960 Fender Showman 6G14, an amplifier made by Fender in 1960 (obviously...). It takes a substantially bigger in size than my design and the interior parts physically seem far more complicated than what Raphaël was showing me. It has requires the same wattage as the bassman 100 design that I am basing my amp off of (100 watts) and it has four tubes. 

I went onto google and searched up the schematic for this amp, I found this.

It has four tubes like mine (although I'm getting rid of two of them because they're arbitrary, according to Raphaël) and much of it looks similar. My basic observation of it is that it isn't more complicated than my own, it's simply cruder and so it looks more complicated because it's a pioneer amp in the industry according to the book. Like mine, it doesn't have a bass section. The book claims that this amp was built specifically for "loud" so I'm guessing that's why the chassis is far bigger than my own.

Update about my project 

I'm really getting irritated because parts are taking forever to arrive and I really don't have as much time as I would like left... Basically a month to complete the entire project! Obviously I want to meet my specifications and be enthusiastic about the state of my project by the deadline, but we'll see. 

So I'm back, parts are coming, I've read a lot, hope to get started on the actual project this week once they arrive.

Peace... 

Meeting with Rafaël

So, I met with Rafaël last night about the amplifier and I thought it was incredibly productive and it has really helped me with what I'm going to do my project.

I learned numerous things about amplifiers that I didn't know previously. Some of these include:

- The position of all the components isn't incredibly sensitive when it comes to performance. Although it may produce hum or other unwanted sounds, it will still work which gives me a sigh of relief because I don't have to be incredibly careful where I put the components. Though, if I want to reduce hum, I should take some care.

- Twisting cables actually reduces hum. This is because of electron nature to flow in a helix which creates interference. By twisting the cables, the electrons flow naturally and there's no hum.

- Some holes that need to be drilled are better done with a press rather than a drill because it's always the exact size that you need and it's less crude.

Rafaël also showed me the chassis and internal components of an amplifier that he is currently working on. (Oh, and by the way, it works perfectly. He's played many music gigs with it.) Although still pretty mind blowing, part of me knows that it doesn't look as incredibly complicated as I expected,

I showed him my timeline and how long we have to finish this product. He thinks that it will be sufficient for finishing.

I also brought the design schematic for my bass amplifier. He made a few changes to it that will help me. Firstly, removing the "bass instrument" section sounds better on bass guitars in his opinion, so I'll get rid of that. Next, he wanted me to double the ohm capacity of some of the fixed resistors on the lower left area of the schematic. Lastly, he wanted me to remove half of the capacitors as they're arbitrary.

Overall, this was a successful session and I'm going to schedule more in the future in order to show him my progress as well as get help and ask questions.

The next step in my project is to completely decode my schematic. I'll create several copies and read them to find out what's in them. It might be a smart idea to start ordering some parts as well.

Timeline - Rough

Meeting

So I'm trying to schedule a time to meet with Rafaël to talk about the schematic he sent me and about building the amplifier. This will probably be sometime in the evening on monday or tuesday. My biggest question will obviously be: How do I go about this?

A few useful websites that I skimmed.

http://sound.westhost.com/project27.htm

http://www.aikenamps.com/SafetyTips.html (Safety Tips!)

I saw an interesting quote from the first website, "One major difference from any "store bought" amplifier is that if you build it yourself, you can modify things to suit your own needs."  I thought this was interesting because it's completely true! For example, if a treble dial is unnecessary, then it can be modified and discarded. (Not that a treble dial is unnecessary...)

Also, a good site for ordering valves is: http://www.guitar-valves.co.uk/index.asp

Schematic Websites

Found a good website that will help me decipher some the schematics that I'm looking at.

http://www.kpsec.freeuk.com/symbol.htm

^ Useful because it shows me numerous different symbols and what they are so that I can actually read something like this.

That's the fender bassman 100 that Rafaël Sutcliffe recommended I do. Next step is to put it into an engineers circuit program. But before that, I think I'll finish building the small tube radio as a precursor to this project just so that I can get a feel for what I'm going to do. I also need to arrange a time to talk to Raphaël about all of this.

Triodes, Diodes, Ect!

Just figured out how triodes and diodes work (So... Basically I figured out how a whole tube amplifier works) So much simpler than I thought, but it makes sense since they figured this all out in the early 20th and later 19th centuries!

Phillips Oscilloscope Fire!

So today I was fiddling around with an old Phillips 50 MHz oscilloscope that I could possibly use for my project when all of a sudden after I pressed a button, caught on fire and smoked vigorously! I raced to get my phone to take a picture but it was already too late and the smoke had already died down. Quite frankly, I'm not even sure you can see the smoke in the picture. But I tried.

The start of a very long process it seems...

Books on Amplifiers

So, for a while now I have been reading several different books on bass amplifiers, guitar amplifiers, and just simply audio. So far, I've looked at 3 and I'd like to summarise how effective they've been. 2 I just found while googling, the other was recommended.

The first is a book called Self on Audio by Douglas Self. The author has been writing magazine articles on amplifiers and electrical engineering for the past 30 years and I thought that this book could be helpful. However, upon picking this book up, it was far too complex, technical, and mathematical for my skill and knowledge level on the subject of amplifiers. I later found out that this book isn't really aimed at novices, but "dedicated audiophiles who want to gain a more complete understanding of the design issues of a truly great amplifier, or a professional electronic designer seeking to learn more about the art of amplifier design, there's no better place to start than with the 35 classic magazine articles collected together in this book." (One of the review's at the back of the book. All others paraphrase the exact same thing.)


I was rather disappointed with this and so I tried another book. 

The next book that I was skimming simultaneously with Self on Audio was Success in Electronics Volume 2 by Tom Duncan. This book was not only easier to tackle for someone of my level, but it was also focused at teaching the basic principles of electronics to novices and beginners alike. The only problem with this book is that it isn't focused on amplifiers or audio devices, just general electronics. This disappointed me because I liked this book far better than the other one. Although helpful, it wasn't exactly what I had been looking for and so after skimming through a few chapters, I gave up to move on to a new one.

The third book was recommended to me by Raphaël Sutcliffe at Sutamps after I traded a few emails to him. It's called Building Valve Amplifiers by Morgan Jones. So far, I have only read/skimmed about 50 pages, but it already is clearly superior to the others because it is focused on the audio, it's written for beginners, and most importantly, it's about the actual construction of amplifiers. It clearly demonstrates to me how to drill holes in sheet metal, how to plan out an amplifier, what equipment and materials to use, ect. I'll have to be sure to fully read the rest of this book if I'm to build a good, working amplifier. 

Ibanez GA1B Transistor Amp

Finally, after a few weeks being away in the United States, I've got a good foothold to start the creation of my project.

This below is the Ibanez GA1B transistor amplifier that I've taken apart and looked at to see how it works. Although it's a different concept than a tube/valve amplifier, it's a start.

Supervisor Meetings

Met with supervisor

I felt that this session was extremely helpful to me as it was the first one and we established what I was going to do. We also talked about how I could do the process journal and planning and how I could use these to aid with my Personal Project.

• Video journal entries mixed into the process journal 
• Written work to look back upon
• Research goes here!

Now so far, all I'm doing is text because I havent really started creating anything yet. Once I have thoughts and feelings about what I'm doing, I'll record them on tape and put them here. Research to come...