Leaderboard

As my dad used to say, raining like cow piss on a flat rock. He was a wwII vet, so maybe he picked it up in France?

Just finished the Season 3 of the White Lotus It could have made a decent 2 hour movie. I spent most of the time playing guitar.

mini T2 with new boards. STN9360 replacing the obsolete KSA1156. Here the 01N100D are replaced with 10M90S and it works all right. The amplifier is configured for EL34/6CA7. Amplifier for 300B by member mla a few posts up. He also have 6A3 - see if he can be persuaded to test them.

The Illegals https://www.townofrossca.gov/recreation/page/live-common-april-25-2025 The illegals in Ross are a eagles cover band, not the help. They may want to change their name in light of recent enforcement. They did play hotel California, however.

Chuzos de punta (point down spiky sticks)

Wish I had seen them.....came close, but I didn't know who they were early on. In 1979, I was working as part of the "Miscellaneous" (aka "Shit") Crew at a hotel in Lynn, MA. It had The Main Act, a concert club, attached to it. I was only 14 at the time and working with a permit. But even though underage, they let me stay for shows sometimes. Saw some great local and a few national/international bands. Even met a drunk/high Glenn Tilbrook from Squeeze! In any case, I saw an ad for Pere Ubu that they were playing, but they were in suits & ties in the ad. So I dismissed them, and regret it now as I never got the opportunity to see them after that. I think I would have loved them.... RIP David Thomas.

There are stories both ways about electrolytic capacitors. As an example, I have an AVO transistor tester (just for historical curiosity; an early 1960's beast). The large circuit board is rammed full with Plessey axial electrolytics, and had not been powered for decades. They all measured just fine with my PEAK ESR meter (it also reads capacitance too). So I just fired it up - works perfectly. But the dreaded power supply and output electrolytics in the old Quad 303 power amp were arranged so the vent faced downwards towards the circuit boards. Quad got steady returns as a result of rotted circuit boards because of electrolyte venting, eventually doing what they should have done originally and put the vents upwards. And the old Sprague "twist-lock" electrolytics eventually disconnect themselves because of the outer foil being crimped into a steel closure - so the foil suffers from dissimilar metal corrosion. Modern electrolytics are physically much smaller for a given voltage, capacitance and ripple rating. This is really a mix of more highly etched foils and improvements in electrolyte chemistries. But they tend to be more highly stressed - and lifetime goes as the Arrhenius equation. The lifetime of the capacitor halves for every 10C increase in temperature. The flip side is that if you conservatively rate the capacitor, its lifetime will exceed the lifetime of the engineer. As an example, suppose the capacitor lifetime at 85C is 2000 hours (about 3 months). If it is run at 35C, being 50C under the maximum increases the lifetime to 2^5 x 2000 hours, or 64,000 hours, or 8 years if turned on permanently. If it is turned on say 3 hours a day, the lifetime of the capacitor should be 64 years. By which time I would be 123 years old and long being with the choir eternal. Of course this is a idealistic calculation, and rubber seals will have degraded enough to cause the capacitor to fail much earlier than that.