That “Other” Project

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I have been working on the new SET chassis design but that’s not all I’ve been doing. This morning I got a little surprise when I checked on my sump pump under the house. It’s starting the rainy season here and I wanted to make sure everything was ready to go. Unfortunately, I found myself replacing a GFCI outlet and the sump pump that had failed and taken the outlet with it. Since the morning was shot, I decided to finish up a couple of other little projects this afternoon. Last week I mentioned another project, the portable class D amp. We’ll, I took a little time this afternoon to finish off that one.

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Waiting for Paint

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So I’ve had the chassis and metal done for the 6CY7 V2 amp since the 4th of July. It has now been a full 13 days and… the paint is not yet fully cured. It is hard for me to remember it ever taking this long for a semi-gloss enamel on metal to cure hard enough to begin assembly work. Obviously the manufacturer has changed the solvent makeup of the paint I use. Time to find another manufacturer. In the mean time, I’ve been working on other things.

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Tube Tools

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Like everyone else all over the world, for the last four months I’ve been working from home and limiting my trips out out of the house. But the situation these last four months has not been entirely unwelcome (except of course for people getting sick). For one thing, the view from my home office of trees and mountains is immensely better than the windowless building in which I was working. And for another thing with no commutes and flexible schedules, I have gained several additional hours in my day for doing things I want to do. With all I new found time, I did what any responsible technical person would do in such uncertain times. I’ve been teaching myself some new skills.

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Change is Good

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I want to start by rolling the clock all the way back to March 6th of this year. It was Friday and I had just returned from a business trip the night before. That afternoon (Thursday) my employer had decided that everyone was to start working from home immediately. Not wanting to try performing complex engineering tasks with only a laptop screen, I immediately ordered two nice high definition 24″ monitors. But the question was where to put them. The “answer” was, on my office desk where I usually do tube work, including prototyping and assembly. This gave me a good spot to do my job, but with two large monitors and their ample stands, it left little space for power supplies, oscilloscopes, signal generators, and other such trappings of my vacuum tube amplifier work.

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