OT Pictures!

[sean k]

My little moonlight amp ain't cutting it no more so I just dug this out for more power.

Made years ago but nver quite turned on I'm going to finally finish it off. I'll get my bro to do some patterned bark tan leather to skin it and do the corners in hand beaten copper with brass screws. The Vogue and Super badges are from cars and the Vogue one will be on a aluminium grille.

[Br4d13y]

whoa!! i am diggin the retro vibe of that enclosure!!   looks gorgeous, are you gonna paint it or just clearcoat the wood?

[JKowalski]

Wow, I am just loving your style Sean. Keep it up 

Those car logos are a great idea! Might have to search around for some myself!

[sean k]

There was a old Jansen amp for sale on our version of ebay a while back and it was so art deco. The tolex was a zebra or tiger skin type style and all the knobs were a mixture of clear plastic and cream and the thing was highlighted in gold. Man it was beautiful!

So I'd already done the basic styling on this years ago but after seeing this amp I want to get my brother, who paints and refinishes leathers of all descriptions to get a thin tight leather, not upholstery or clothing style soft leather, and we'll paint up some kind of animalish stripe in some colours that'll be to wow for words.

I originally tried putting zebrawood veneer on it but that wouldn't take so I gave up so now I have this idea of covering it in leather and then putting some black walnut on the exposed outer edges and hand hammering up some copper sheet for the corners and the edges around the front.

In this photo, don't worry about the ABS shelled monitor (I was told it was in a bin so I went and got it and all it needed was a correct impedance tweeter and I've since given it away to a good home), to the left is a 15" Jensen bass speaker in an old barbecue body.

I really love rounded things and I've always kinda disliked the rectangular and sqaured off enclosures we use for building tube amps so the idea that led me to the barbecue speaker enclosure, its good and easy to move it around and play feedback notes, had me thinking of hand beating up some aluminium to attach a tube amps innards to... even running some of the electrics on the outside of the enclosure and then caging it to stop dumbies getting a shock.

For me it's important that we don't take for granted the various ways we build stuff. Fx pedals and amps are rectangular and therefore efficient for the job they do but it doesn't mean we have to build them that way. Two aluminium shapes that would form almost a peanut shape would be a very interesting enclosure for a tube amp even though its efficiency as a musical instrument, in the regular sense, might be compromised the insights and directions that it would open up might be more important than the short term loss of ergonomic efficiency.

This guys work in furniture is really invigorating for me and I want to apply it to musical stuff.

http://www.bentfabrication.com/pram.html

[sean k]

Almost finshed this little amp. 12AX7 preamp into 2N5457 source follower into big muff tone then TDA2003. Schematics in a thread in the regular form. Still gotta put a handle and feet on it plus I'm going to do the grill and a hinged back ala pignose effect.



Still haven't even plugged it in or tried it out. One other thing I'll do is, I got this from the valve wizards site under other stuff, is to put an LED in series with the B+ of 270VDC and the plate resistor which takes a second or two to come on and helps to alleviate cathde stripping while the filaments warm up, could even use a few and switch them out once we're up to electron cloud full dispersion.

[Brymus]

I really like the copper corner protectors.
+1

[sean k]

Bryan, you might like my blog about all this stuff, if you didn't know already.
http://artyone.blogtown.co.nz/

[Taylor]

Wow, Sean, really cool. Do you build amps and reverbs for others? I might have to have something of yours sometime...

[sean k]

I would build things for others, if they were willing to pay lots. Well not even lots but enough though so far no ones been interested...here in New Zealand anyways. I've got in the back of my mind some high end fx with super basic circuits to sell on E-Bay but as yet I'm still busy keepin' busy.

And this is how you build a grill for your amps speaker.

No1: Find a big old aluminiumpot thats bottom has gone and dished in or out and copy on a pattern from an old wooden grill that you never got around to finishing.

Then spend an hour or two cutting it out with a jigsaw...having to stop every so often to use a sharp blade to get off the aluminium dross thats ended up sticking to the jigsaw blade. You'll know theres dross involved because the jigsaw strts jumpin'.

Then cut it away from the pot and see if it fits.

Then it's just a matter of a few hours hammering it from the back to stretch the metal and have the thing dish out nicely and then filing it all clean. Next step is attaching a few lugs so it'll be able to be screwed to the amp front. This too is time consuming because one uses bronze brazing rods as rivets which need to be cut to size then drilled out and hand hammered with ball pein hammers to be tight and long lasting.

So there you go Taylor, 6 hours later, I've made a grill for the amp and at 35 - 40 bucks an hour its about 200 bucks just for a grill. Thats most probably why people haven't offered to buy my stuff and I haven't offered it for sale. It'd cost too damn much! I wouldn't buy it.

[Thomeeque]

 Hi!

Great stuff here!!

I have finally forced me to do this:





Unfortunately I had to leave output jack cavity unshielded, whole job took more time then expected and we had gig that evening, so I had to stop at this state and put it together quickly to be able to have guitar and myself ready on time

Cheers, T.

[sean k]

I've got a performance coming up and I'll be working with a woman and so I'm building her an instrument to play. The performance will be called "Stilled life with intercontinental remote controlled mail dirigables". It's kind of based on a running joke between us about getting an SK1 casio out of storage in Germany and sent to New Zealand while also being about lives left behind and making new ones accross the world.

So she has this thing which will feature Ricks wind machine mixed with microphones then into a set of strings with a sustainer and picked up with pickups then mixed again with the mic/wind machine and sent into speakers next to a sheet, plate reverb, picked up by piezo's on the sheet and mixed again with mic/wind/ sustained strings... and then out.

This is the side facing the player so the string tuning and the strings themselves will be accessible and the control box with lots of knobs will be just above the string winders. The wooden cross piece above the speaker back, for the reverb, is actually the sustainer cover which is two 16 ohm windings around 8 mild steel poles with neodenium magnets attached to the bottoms.

These are the microphones that'll be attached behind the head. One, on the left, is something called a planar ribbon and goes into a small 8 ohm/1k transformer which given the ribbon is 200 ohms would work out to 200/10k, at a bad guess, but it doesn't matter because it works. The right hand mic is an old telephone mic I think and I'm not sure what it is but it gives quite a nice strong output even without DC and does the high pass kinda staticky thing quite well.

This is the original mockup of the front, facing audience, and the big ol' barbacue dish has another speaker in it, above the reverb plate, which'll be out of phase with the speaker behind the reverb, well in phase signal wise, but out of phase because its facing the back towards the other speakers front and will provide a little output apart from the line out to another amp.

She's gonna freak out when she sees it

[Taylor]

More awesome stuff Sean! Would love to hear it. Any chance this performance could be videotaped and put on Youtube or something?

[sean k]

That would be nice wouldn't it? I don't know yet if the performance is even slatted to happen... but if it does then the woman is a video lecturer so the chances are quite high that that could indeed happen. I asked the chaps wh run the show to get me some contact with her but as yet nothings happened so it may be that they are busy and won't let me know till the last minute... and still expect a show or that they don't intend to put it in and aren't bothering to tell me.

They kinda want me to get better at my chops with specific instruments but I tend to keep showing up with new instruments that I haven't usually even tried out and then have lots of fun working out what they'll do in front of a live audience. Thats heaps of fun for me but I think the curators are a little peeved at me for carrying on in this way... then this one time when they want a performance and I do everything by the book, they ignore me which means I'll obviously revert back to normal... and make things up on the spot.

It's a little bit politial I think and though I end up playing heaps, with lots of different people, the powers that be don't quite know how to measure me up and allocate a place for me... in the natural scheme of things. So I've got to basically play it as it hits me and I think it'll still be a little while before they give me the space I need to properly make use of my gizmos.

I know it sounds silly but to have one of my pieces videotaped would be a bit out of line as the videotaping tends to happen only with the old time stars and overseas visitors.. the youngbloods have to wait there turn!

But we'll see.

[JFX09]

x0xb0x: This thing is alive and kickin' !!!

[momo]

I would build things for others, if they were willing to pay lots. Well not even lots but enough though so far no ones been interested...here in New Zealand anyways. I've got in the back of my mind some high end fx with super basic circuits to sell on E-Bay but as yet I'm still busy keepin' busy.

And this is how you build a grill for your amps speaker.

No1: Find a big old aluminiumpot thats bottom has gone and dished in or out and copy on a pattern from an old wooden grill that you never got around to finishing.

Then spend an hour or two cutting it out with a jigsaw...having to stop every so often to use a sharp blade to get off the aluminium dross thats ended up sticking to the jigsaw blade. You'll know theres dross involved because the jigsaw strts jumpin'.

Then cut it away from the pot and see if it fits.

Then it's just a matter of a few hours hammering it from the back to stretch the metal and have the thing dish out nicely and then filing it all clean. Next step is attaching a few lugs so it'll be able to be screwed to the amp front. This too is time consuming because one uses bronze brazing rods as rivets which need to be cut to size then drilled out and hand hammered with ball pein hammers to be tight and long lasting.

So there you go Taylor, 6 hours later, I've made a grill for the amp and at 35 - 40 bucks an hour its about 200 bucks just for a grill. Thats most probably why people haven't offered to buy my stuff and I haven't offered it for sale. It'd cost too damn much! I wouldn't buy it.

WoW man, that cover would go great on top of this....
Its a wooden thing I got, its got a 12 inch opening, I thought of maybe using it as a funky cabinet....

[tommy.genes]

That's a foundry pattern, used for sand casting. My dad was a pattern maker.

-- T. G. --

[a soBer Newt]

New noise making device.  Has 2 oscillators one 4049 cmos distortion and one 4040 divider. click on images for larger view

[StereoKills]

Why polarity protection is a good idea....... or what the inside of a tantalum cap looks like 

[JKowalski]

Why polarity protection is a good idea....... or what the inside of a tantalum cap looks like 

There are reasons why tantalum caps are expressly denounced as power supply filters. 

What board is that?

[StereoKills]

A small expansion board to drive a resistance based heater on a medical device we are developing. This little accident happened at work and released quite a bit of smoke!