Getting Organized and About Those Jigs

I currently have a couple of major projects on the workbench and a few other minor tube circuit investigations underway. When this happens I find myself pulling things off of shelves, moving other things around, and generally creating quite the mess until I’m having problems finding just about anything. When this happens I generally step back and take some time to get everything organized again. But this time, I wasn’t quite prepared for what I found.

Continue reading

More on Tube Testing

The discussion on tube testers and their usefulness (or not) got me thinking about my own tube testing needs and how I go about it. I already have a solution for octal power tubes with the 7S base pinout which I’ve mentioned before. But what about those ubiquitous signal triodes I seem to use in almost every project? What should I do about them?

Continue reading

Single Purpose Jigs

For those that are paying particular attention to my amp builds it will come as no surprise that I think the #44 and #47 (0.9 and 0.5 candela respectively) indicator lamps are a little bright to be used on tube amps. I just think that they tend to overpower the look of the amplifier when the room gets dim. However, as these lamps are ubiquitous, it pays to use them in our builds. So, on the 6DJ8 Headphone amp and the 6EM7 vertical amp I included a small adjustment potentiometer to tame these power indicators. And on the Marblewood amp, I chose a fixed 25Ω 1W resistor to dim the indicator.

Continue reading