Back to square one... success! Dumb mistake

[Structo]

Most of the time it is a simple mistake that will confound us.

Often times we are overlooking it because we don't think we would make
an obvious error.

When you finally see it, it is a face palm moment.



Glad you got it fixed and making music now.

[Randy Magee]

I didn't notice it yesterday, but I have a ticking that sounds a bit like a tremelo circuit ticking. It is unaffected by any of the controls and subbing tubes didn't change anything. It happens with an instrument plugged in or not plugged in. A dodgy capacitor maybe?

[redshark]

The express is an amp that takes a little while to fine tune. There's a lot of gain so things get out of hand easily. I got it working perfectly the first time cause I checked all my connections and still it took me 7 months to figure out that my input jack was wired wrong. So patiently you will fix every little thing that causes a little problem that you might be able to hear while the amp is performing.
Then you get to the tubes!!!!

[Cliff Schecht]

I didn't notice it yesterday, but I have a ticking that sounds a bit like a tremelo circuit ticking. It is unaffected by any of the controls and subbing tubes didn't change anything. It happens with an instrument plugged in or not plugged in. A dodgy capacitor maybe?

Sounds like it's coming from the wall. You could try a line filter to squish any wall noise. Any sort of power conditioner that's worth a piss will have lots of line filtering to kill any wall noise. And heck, if this isn't it then at least you've narrowed down your possibilities .

[Randy Magee]

Turns out it was a dodgy preamp tube... every tube I have is monophonic in the V1 position... turns out it was several that I subbed that was making that ticking sound... should I add a grid stopper resistor to V1?

[redshark]

No, I wouldn't do that. Just don't put the amp on top of the speaker cab. And if you have to do it put some foam to kill the vibration. The amp is sensitive to mechanic and microphonic effect from the speaker cab. Glen Kuykendall has said that he can get away with microphonic tubes on V1 as long as the cab has certain distance from speaker cab.

[Randy Magee]

I need to shop for some better preamp tubes, but to be honest, what is in there sounds pretty good. All in good time I suppose...

[fishy]

Excellent news on the amp.
Mistakes are good learning tools for sure and we all make them.

Enjoy your amp and kudos for sticking with it.

[Randy Magee]

Thanks fishy... appreciate you guys support while I was in panic mode! I've never had a build that I had to troubleshoot before, I suppose it was overdue...

[Bob S]

Hey Randy - great news.
Lots of us have been leaving the help to the more experienced guys.
But we all felt your pain.
In my case, I know exactly how it feels.
Bob

[Randy Magee]

The amp is really coming around now... I retubed to 6V6GTs and that change stopped it from further peeling the paint off my walls, though it's still quite loud. I repositioned a few wires and moved all the wires from the underside of the power board to the topside and I now have no more squeals at very high volumes, whereas it would squeal a bit even with nothing plugged in when the volume knob hit about 3 o'clock. I think it's going to be quite nice on it's next outing!

[RJ Guitars]

Congrats on the fix... mistakes are a critical part of success! We all learned a bit from this and thinking about it you could trouble shoot this pretty quick if you had these symptoms again. You might recall a couple threads running at the same time with similar results but entirely different problems. It's never easy to just hear it and know whats wrong, especially if the problem is on the back side of the board.

Now the fun begins... taking her out and gigging with her. The Express has been said to be like the great looking reckless girlfriend - your going to get noticed when you are with her but she'll flirt with any body and all your friends will want to take her away from you.

rj

[M Fowler]

If it wasn't for all my dumb mistakes I wouldn't have learn a thing.

Heck it wasn't that long ago on one of my Dr Z's zwreck builds I put the bypass caps in backwards. A forum member noticed it.

Also did that on a bias board in another amp. I noticed the caps had negative to ground instead of positive to ground on the bias board, but I caught that mistake myself before I finished so all was well.

You need to laugh at your own mistakes or life just gets too weird.

Mark

[RJ Guitars]

...You need to laugh at your own mistakes or life just gets too weird...Mark

I can't seem to stop laughing