Fun with a two-tube amplifier kit!

This stuff is so much more fun when it's not your job. Yesterday, I pulled this Gilmore Junior 1/2 watt amp kit out from under my couch. After (literally!) blowing the dust off, I got organized, started building, and remembered how much 'I love the smell of hot solder in the morning'. I stopped for the day and snapped a pic:



With the addition of four or five more components and wires, it's going to be my new headphone amp with 500 sweet milli-watts of tube tone. The front panel controls are intended to be volume and tone, but my plan is to add another input jack and go vol/vol (or vol/balance) so I can mix in an audio track to play along with.

 

The last one I did was a clone of a Fender Champ from Weber a little over five years ago - another elegant design with nothing to clutter up the inherent sweetness.

This current kit is a Cadillac - top-notch everything including silver mica coupling caps and custom iron by Mercury Magnetics. The 6n1P output tube actually operates class A/B.

 

I bought mine from this guy about five years ago: http://www.guytronix.com/

A simpler solution occurred: leave the tone control alone and run a shielded pig-tail with an in-line jack through a convenient grommet in the chassis, wire it in parallel with the input jack and use the volume control on the MP3 or other media player to mix to taste.

 

Had to make a Radio Shack run today for parts to rig a defeat-able dummy load. The two ten-ohm wire-wound resistors in parallel are reading six ohms, the amp will be seeing slightly under that with headphones plugged in - poifect! The turret board is now fully populated and beginning to sprout connection wires:

 

Aarrgh! My 6N1P-EB seems to have lost its vacuum. Waiting on a replacement from TUBEMAN....

 

Well, I installed the new tube and it's amplifying - a LOUD buzz. Troubleshooting....

 

I like the way you think! Actually, when I purchased the kit, I also acquired the 'booster kit' which will allow it to kick our TWO WHOLE watts!