How not to star ground

[mirage_indigo]

I recently cracked the first amp I ever built to fix some issues in the tone stack (I'd wired the bass and treble backwards 15 years ago and never got around to fixing them. (Incidental hooray for the original ampage.com crew that walked me through my first build). I was somewhat horrified by the state of my own wiring.

I therefore submit this as a good example of how not to wire an amp.

This is my first ever attempt before I learned about star grounding or jack isolation or well, neatness. The build itself went ok as I'd planned everything fairly well, but I found the lack of a good ground bus basically did me in on neatness, most of the spray of brown wires from the right side are grounds headed out to individual pots and resistors.

So the moral of the story is planning! It'll save your build and allow you to recover when things go weird.

Despite the horrendous mess, the amp sounds pretty good and is reasonably quiet except the reverb driver overloads and blats out with distortion. It is hella loud. The design is a single channel ab763 reverb preamp with brownface style modulation trem and a Plexi ish style Poweramp but with 6l6gc.

[norburybrook]

thanks for sharing. It's a point to point build so they do tend to be a bit chaotic

At the end of the day it's the sound that counts and if it works and sounds like you want, the rest isn't that important as long as it's safe IMHO.

I do love to see beautifully built amps, with perfect layouts and lead dress, but I know it's not what makes an amp sound great. I still strive to be tidy and neat though when I build.


I've not achieved that yet however


M

[mirage_indigo]

The chassis ended up being way too small, so about 4 more inches would be a huge improvement. I'm looking at recycling the guts of this into a new chassis with a much better star-ground-power-capacitor-midships style layout. I can pull the filter caps and most of the expensive parts into a new layout.

I used an ObsoleteElectronics plexi output transformer that really really needs a better home to do it justice. I have two more, one of which is about to go into a JM Sig/wonderland build, the other will go into a ODSR clone.

[studiodunn]

You are a far better builder for showing your less than perfect guts off.

I guess we all have "rats nest" skeletons in the closet as well. And funny enough, one of the ugliest is one of the quietest....go figure.

[Phil_S]

If it's quiet and it sounds good, there isn't much to critique. Neatness may count, but not always. Of course, if you have to repair it, it's a real headache. That's quite an accomplishment for a first build. My suggestion, FWIW, don't fix it until it's broken.

[ChopSauce]

On a related matter, a ground bus makes the whole difference between



&



both sharing the same (Vox AC4) circuit.