jnewman

Actually, the Bosch 1590/1591 jigsaws are getting reviews as being pretty much the best around. I have one, and it's incredible.

They have one of the most powerful motors in any current-production jigsaw, and they also have a unique blade guide system like that on a bandsaw - instead of just a support from behind the blade, there are also supports that clamp against the blade from the sides immediately above the sole of the tool. It has less blade wander than any other jigsaw I've ever used and is truly a precision tool.

It's also a good bit less expensive than the Festool . The 1590 is the normal-style while the 1591 is the barrel grip.

I used a 3/8" bit last time I did it... I bought mine from Woodcraft. They're german bits about 10" long and they do a really, really good job - perfectly clean holes.

Nah, they still make 'em. I bought mine from Kendrick amplifiers. The amp I built is a Trainwreck Climax, which was made in the mid 90's and used 2x10" 8ohm Fanes.

How are you trying to use the blend pot with that setup? There are a huge number of different things you could set it up to do.

Hey, it gets worse than that... look up Fane speakers.

I just put two of them in an amp I just finished building (because they were the speakers in the original), and it sounds fantastic but MAN were they expensive....

An 1/8" band saw blade can cut a 1/4" radius curve. That should be fine for anything on most guitars, and an extra blade only costs about $10.

If you get "float glass" instead of plate glass, it should all be flat enough. Float glass is made by letting the glass harden slowly while floating on a pool of molten tin, and it's almost perfectly flat.

I'm sorry, but I have to chime in here. I'm really not trying to be either rude or mean, but I have to say this. If you felt like it was reasonable to ask if you could mod a 15W amp to 100W or 200W, you have no business (at this point) building or modifying anything with tubes. Vacuum tube amps run with some potentials over 350V DC which can and will kill you if you do the wrong thing.

If you want to learn more about electronics and learn (and get to be in the habit of) safe building practices and then start on tubes, go ahead - but jumping in without any background is very, very dangerous.

The site says they're less than $100 in hardware WITHOUT the motors/controllers/software, i.e. without the really expensive stuff .

You could try:

www.tubeampparts.com and secure.tubesandmore.com

That's the one problem . The one thing I'm going to do that'll make it easier is just have the edges rounded over with about a 1/8" radius - I'm not going for an exact LP carve, and I'm not really trying to make it look exactly like binding.

I don't think it'd make any difference at all, other than a cosmetic one. I'm in a similar situation to yours, with about a 2" thick limba blank. I had it resawn into a piece 1 1/8" thick and a piece 3/4" thick. I'm putting a piece of 3/8" wenge between the two, then carving down to the top of the wenge - I think it'll look really good, it'll add the thickness I need, and then I won't have to mess with binding .

As long as you're sure it's the right capacitance, it should work fine.

That website won't come up for me now. Part of the difference may be that Orange Drops are high-voltage film caps usually used in guitar amps, while the normal "guitar caps" are regular old any-voltage ceramic disk caps. Like Paul said, high voltage caps are a LOT larger (because the dielectric layer must be thicker) within a cap type, and it may be that film caps are just bigger than ceramic caps as well - I don't ever use ceramic caps for anything but a bag of 'em for guitar tone controls, so I can't really compare .

That's because the caps in guitars are .022mF caps, not .22mF caps .

Why don't you check yours?. If you download the schematics pack from adadepot, there's a "preamp" schematic that's a part of the whole business that's an enormous pile of opamps and diodes. Every input into the tube PCB comes off of that pile of opamps. Changing the tube PCB will, of course, change the sound drastically, because at line voltages decent opamps are almost completely transparent. The fact remains, however, that a real tube preamp doesn't have opamps in the signal path, or transistors in the tube stage.

If you're looking for more gain than classic marshall designs, check out ax84.com... they have some pretty hi-gain designs.

I dunno... the Vigier Passion's pretty cool - looks kind of like a swoopier Ric bass...

You might want to look at www.ceriatone.com. They have schematics and sell main component boards for marshall 18W, JTM45, Plexi 50W and Plexi 100W amps, as well as a number of Fender amps, two Matchless amps, and a Vox AC30 minus the top-boost board. You could also check out ax84.com - they have their own line of amps.

Having just finished building my first actual amp, from a kit with a chassis and boards supplied, I don't think I'd have wanted to start from scratch on my first one, although I suspect I'd manage now.

Speak of the devil . That's kind of where I was headed, I'm glad you went ahead and said it, heh. I've just about finished wiring up my new amp and it was hard enough with a specific design and layout and premanufactured chassis!

Whatever you do, don't ever, ever buy solder from radioshack. I thought solder was easy enough to make you couldn't screw it up, but RS manages - it turns solder tips black and ruins them.

Man, I don't know... the 2204 and that bit from ADA don't have a lot in common. It wouldn't be a direct drop in preamp, and I just don't know enough about it to be able to tell you if you could turn it into one and what to do with clean, drive, and od2.

It LOOKS like the "clean" "drive" and "od2" inputs take a DC voltage to bias transistors to change the effective resistances that determine gain at different stages in the circuit (which is clever), but I don't know what ranges you'd want to use - I suppose you could figure it out to some degree just by looking at what transistor types it uses.

I'm really no expert at this, but that's how it looks to me - you should really try to get someone like lovekraft to answer you .

You might also try penn fabrication (www.penn-elcom.com). They specifically manufacture aluminum extrusions for flight case hardware and rack cases and so on.

Sorry, I'm an idiot . I wasn't thinking of hot rails, I was actually thinking of things like the SD Lil' 59.

First of all, that's an entirely analog circuit that has nothing at all to do with MIDI (MIDI is a computer-controlled synthesizer sort of thing that entails a bunch of big chips all over the place - there's not a single chip anywhere on that board )

I went to the ADA webpage and downloaded the pile of schematics for the MP-1. The MP-1 has a solid state preamp that's NOT that schematic you posted - what you posted is a separate purely analog tube signal processing stage (that has nothing at all to do with MIDI) that they call the "tube breakaway PCB." I guess it's something they use to add tube distortion once they have the sound output.

The MP-1's preamp is a big complicated ugly solid state affair that couldn't really be ported over, I don't think - that bit you posted is more like a distortion pedal, or at least it looks like it .

Why is it you specifically want the MP-1's preamp? It's almost certainly a better idea to pick out a tube preamp to build rather than take a solid-state preamp and try to change it into a tube amp.