How it's made

[EWBrown]

Last night, on the Discovery Channel, during the show "How it's Made" they did a segment about Traynor guitar amps, the example they showed used a mix of SS and tubes, one "preamp" tube which looked like a 12AX7, and two power tubes, which looked to be EH EL34s.
The PC board was stuffed partly by machine, partly by hand, and then wave-soldered. The completed amp had a 10 (or 12) inch speaker and the spring reverb tank. Nothing big, nothing fancy, the basic portable practice or "garage band" amp.

The following "how it's made" item was hot-dog rolls Yellow_Light_Colorz_PDT_02 Yellow_Light_Colorz_PDT_04 Yellow_Light_Colorz_PDT_09

/ed B in NH

[dhuebert]

I've seen that episode. It's fun to hear you guy's get a Canadian show made in Quebec. What can I say? Those amps are so cheap to buy it dosen't seem to make sense to build them the way I do but alot of players I have spoken to have a clear disdain for PCBs. A fellow I know repaired a Fender recently and told me a resistor got so hot it unsoldered itself and melted its way through a ribbon cable shorting things out. A ribbon cable in a guitar amp? Not in my day sonny boy!

I just wish musicians weren't so damn broke. I have had six requests to build Hammertone BFAs but everytime I mention the price, faces fall.

Don

[4-CHANNEL]

Nothing is free in Canada, 20 years ago when I was staying in this $$$ Fuc'n Country. Without the Money, you can't go anywhere in this stale place.

No free lunch, nothing is free, no money! OUT!!! . All these were spoken by the what we called " Canadian ".

Everything is so expensive, tax, Federal + provincial will take your life away.
how much money can left to fixed your guitar amp.!!! In order to repair my guitar amp. I have to study, learn, asking people how? Finally I can fixed my guitar amp. by myself. Deserved fuck!!! Yellow_Light_Colorz_PDT_21 Yellow_Light_Colorz_PDT_21 Yellow_Light_Colorz_PDT_21

[sorenj07]

The canadian dollar is 99.2% of the value of a US dollar, so no complaining.

[Geek]

The canadian dollar is 99.2% of the value of a US dollar, so no complaining.

*ahem* 102.214% as of this post - www.xe.com

BUYING SPREE! Yellow_Light_Colorz_PDT_04

[erichayes]

1.0253

WHEEE

[nyazzip]

canadians just like to bitch........hey i know, because 100% of my relatives are canadian.
anyway, i have a new Traynor el34 combo. i had it apart, and i will tell you, it seems very well made in my estimation. impressive. as far as the electronics engineering goes, well, i dunno, but regarding cabinet, chassis/access, finish, components, soldering, and end-user features/sound, for the cost, this amp is pretty cool....and, it is fabbed entirely in north america! indeed, the reverb tanks are manufactured 10 miles up the fox river from me(Accutronics). ontario transformers.
its surely not a pure valve boutique signal path, but it rocks out nice and hard for modern hi-gain crunch sounds IMO
my 2 cents

[EWBrown]

Good thing I've been saving the assorted Canadian coins I get inmy change around here... Watch the money grow, I've probably increased my wealth by fifty cents! :o Yellow_Light_Colorz_PDT_04 Yellow_Light_Colorz_PDT_05

B*tching isn't just the Canadian National SPort, New Englanders are (in)famous for that as well, they'le kvetch, b*tch and whine about everything... My prime subjects are the eternally nasty weather around here, and politics in general. At least I try to keep the latter subject out of here Yellow_Light_Colorz_PDT_09

/ed B in NH

[Newbietube]

[quote="EWBrown"]Last night, on the Discovery Channel, during the show "How it's Made" they did a segment about Traynor guitar amps, the example they showed used a mix of SS and tubes, one "preamp" tube which looked like a 12AX7, and two power tubes, which looked to be EH EL34s.
The PC board was stuffed partly by machine, partly by hand, and then wave-soldered. The completed amp had a 10 (or 12) inch speaker and the spring reverb tank. Nothing big, nothing fancy, the basic portable practice or "garage band" amp.

The following "how it's made" item was hot-dog rolls Yellow_Light_Colorz_PDT_02 Yellow_Light_Colorz_PDT_04 Yellow_Light_Colorz_PDT_09
Hi all I'm new here and have just started to learn about valve amps. I'm a bassist and have a working background of electronics and electro mechanical engineering. I've been doing amp repairs as a sideline and of late have fixed several makes of amp built in the way you describe. Its not a good way of doing it, in fact its rubbish. You cant really build a valve amp any other way than point to point. I even had one amp in that had surface mount components on the same board as all the big power resistors. Awfull.
Anyway I'm glad to have found this site and will probably be posting some stupid questions in due course.
Cheers Just

[EWBrown]

The best approach for a tube / valve guitar amp is point to point wiring, or use one of the tag / terminal boards from Triode, or AES, and some of these are exact replicas of those inside the better known brand-name amps, so you can make a near-clone of your favorite amp, or a combination / frankenstein of something in-between.


Circuit boards are better for ease of construction, but aren't so great if you do a lot of experimentation with the circuitry.

/ed B in NH / NC

[nyazzip]

i've never fully understood the "point to point is best" argument. i understand that original PCBs can break down over the course 4 or 5 decades, and can be harder to repair/modify, but lets say i only intend to keep my PCB amp for a mere 30 years, and have no intention of "modding" it.... if PCBs were so horrible, i doubt they would be used with such frequency, in military and ET applications. to me, "point to point" equals many more inches/feet of wire the signal has to squirm around in, and many more square cm of unshielded/poorly shielded solder area exposure, before it finally reaches the output tranny. am i wrong to look at it this way?
i worked for motorola and for a brief while it was my job to operate a machine that applied a solder paste to a blank CB(no "P" yet) via robot controlled stencil and squeegee...after this artwork was done, the components were robotically placed (a few manually)down the conveyor line, atop the "wet" paste, then the whole shebang got baked in an IR conveyor @300C or so, melting the metal particles suspended in the solder paste, and presumably "cooking off" the rest of the solder vehicle.
the boards seemed pretty durable and the yield was high; by far the biggest error was with the robot placing components innaccurately....granted, many chips were much smaller than a pinhead, and placed at a rate of many cycles per second, with an accuracy of 0.2mm or better...the component-placing bots sounded and rather looked like machine guns during a production run; i think they were for the most part pneumatically powered
anyway, i came away from that gig with a respect for the PCB. cheap? yes. inferior to 1930s style "point to point"? not sure why that would be.

[dhuebert]

Shannon's products are PCB and the quality is top notch, no doubt, and a great solution.

Printed circuit boards have two problems as I see it: I only build one of anything guitar amp-wise, and cost cutting.

I'll explain: prototyping(ie. one off) using PCBs can be very time consuming and expensive in materials when moving thru iterations to a final version. For production this is amortized over the production run but for onezies it can really balloon costs.

One of the real banes of PCBs is cost cutting. A Blues Junior, for instance, is $400, how do they hit that price point, you wonder? That's right, by making the PCB as cheaply as possible. Another popular solution to cost cutting is to select component values as close to failure mode as possible. Burned traces and components that unsolder themselves are the result. For a guitar amp that is gigged all around the country this can be a disaster. Point to point is also susceptible to breakage but fault finding and repair of a point to point is generally easier than dismantling a bunch of pots etc to get access to both sides of the board. And remember kiddies, damage to a PCB is irreversable.

I make my living repairing PCBs and they have taken over the world for good reason but for one off and quick prototyping, I'll take P2P.

BTW When I worked in research I did a ton of wire wrapping, remember wire wrapping? For prototyping any kind of low voltage circuit it can't be beat. I read a book once that said all the electronics in the Apollo craft were wire wrapped. Apparently, some of the programs for the computer were wire wrapped so if a change in code was needed Buzz had to get out the tools and start unwrapping. No mistakes now or we're all goners!

Don