Leaderboard

Tonight was a return to non-wood based making. One of the other folks retiring this year (good lord, please make it stop) is one of our electrical engineering techs who's just a cool guy. He's already retired once from being a full time electrician but has been with us for 5 or 6 years. He sits outside my office so we talk quite a bit and I wanted to make sure that he had a unique way to remember the island when he left. So I worked with our CADD department to isolate the AC electrical grid that runs underground on the island that Tom (the retiree) had to work with every day. I reverse engraved it on an acrylic sheet and also used the laser to cut it out before mounting it to a lighted LED base (it came as a kit). Pretty simple project, should make a fun light to have around the house. The worst part of it was polishing out all the fine scratches in the acrylic that were left by trying to remove the burn-off staining that was a result of the lasering. I'm happy with the finished product and think he will be too.

Fecking hawt! Such a bunch of lucky retirees who worked with you, Nate. Between you and Naaman, lots of people who served this country are heading to retirement very happy.

Just six years later than Colin, I have now made this cheese buldak recipe twice and love it.

Just a hop, skip and a jump away from me. I'm going to pass though

Secret Santa gift for a whiskey group.

Spent most of the day going through scraps trying to find something flat enough to make into a cutting board. Ended up with a Wenge/Teak plan but not sure if I need something brighter in there for pop. Also gave up on the cast iron looking paint technique and put together the cabinet under the saw. Need to buff out the wax but as about as close to cast iron as I could figure out. The leveling feet ended up being boring so when I have access to a welder in Texas I am going to weld some bolts onto some blade wrenches and throw those on there.

There are far simpler ways of making that bias supply, a simple voltage divider off the B+ would work just fine. For the pro bias, I'd put an adjustable voltage doubler off the main transformer, see something like the original KGSS article on Headwise memorial.

Electric Light Orchestra – Face the Music I heard some hints of where Goldfrapp got their sound...

vinyl

vinyl

got the second batch of transformers from SumR. Now the filament voltages are 14% too high, but transformers run cool. 7.3448 volts on the 6.3v line (zoom in) in other news the 300v regulated power supply with the appropriate fixes works great.

Also fucking cool! Being made from USS Constitution parts is pretty fucking special, as is a combined 86 years of service. Nice work! And I didn't mean to be remiss in saying how amazing the M&O sign is because it is amazing indeed.

Steve was a fantastic and giving guy. The world would be a much better place if we had more Steve's around. You are truly missed my friend.

Here is something that has been cooking for a while but I've been just too busy to do anything about it. So JR Audio out of China have been building our amp designs for a while now and I started to hear horror stories almost immediately. They naturally have no right to use our designs and work in their crappy products but since when has that stopped anybody... I have been looking for one of these amps for a while now as I want to rip it apart and well... one owner contacted me. I'm going to ask him to come here and tell his story which is quite the tale. Let's just say Caveat emptor... So here is the amp and it arrived dead which will soon be clear. It is the KGSSHV version and well... it doesn't resemble my amp in any way... 🙄 One funny thing is that the Stax socket is made from nylon so the quality starts there. 😉 Nothing remarkable here but that voltage marking is directly lifted from my amps. Completely identical... Here is where I started laughing, this thing uses clone versions of old PCB's I made back in the day. The amplifier board (as can be seen by the date which they also copied) was in some of the older KGSSHV mini amp but this one is quite a bit bigger. Same goes for the PSU which was in the first KGSSHV minis but this one is 2.5cm wider and 1cm taller. All the components are in the same spots... it's just a bit bigger. Now here is whats wrong with it, see the bridge rectifier in the middle. That larger chunk of plastic shouldn't be sticking out of it. Here is one amplifier section and I just find it hilarious that they do a direct copy of my 7 year old PCB but manage to completely fuck it up while doing it. So all of those resistors are 1/4W units and that is a big no-no. Most are well shy of that power level (though not all) but the voltage ratings for many of those resistors is well below safe levels. It also annoys me (Kevin even more) that they have removed all values off the boards and replaced them with generic labels. We have always pushed for proper markings on all boards so they can be serviced at any time. Another thing clear in that picture are the 10M90's on that small heatsink on the PSU. They have a lot of voltage sitting on the metal tab so they naturally use a silpad and metal screw. Fucking amateur hour here. Another picture of the damage and one more of the underside: One nice attention to detail... or lack thereof is no thermal paste or silpad on the PSU pass transistors. Nothing at all and since the chassis is powerder coated, it has a hard time passing heat through the thin metal below. It's a shame I don't have any of these old PCB's in stock just to show how much of a blatant rip off they are. I'm tempted to order some (as I have the Gerbers for everything) just to show off what they are up to. Now what happens to this amp, well it belongs to me so I'm going throw out the PSU and the transformer plus replace all the necessary resistor on the amplifier boards to make this safe. Then I'll just keep it for shits and giggles. I'll update the thread when I do some more work on this clusterfuck.

He passed in his sleep just after 8:00 am Alaska time. I'm glad he didn't suffer.