A little bit of planning.

Alright, now that the Canada Post ordeal is...well, I can't say over because it's not but at least they're delivering mail now! I should be getting the last of my parts in sometime this week.

So far, the biggest challenge I've come across so far with doing a from scratch build of an amp is just figuring out what I'm going to need. I spent the month of May and a bit of June planning out, choosing my parts.

Choosing caps, resistors, transformers, pots, switches... that's the easy part. Figuring out how to put everything together and an even bigger question, will it all fit? Those are the two things that will never be totally answered until the build is finished.

One of the best things you can do is to just draw it out with dimensions. The last thing you want is to have this great plan and then not have enough space to pull it off. I've made crude, but effective sketches of my control panel, chassis layout and they've helped a lot in realizing how little space you actually have to work with.

A problem I ran into was not having enough space on my control panel. I wanted a standby switch but I started drawing it out with how much clearance I need for all the knobs and I quickly found out that I was out of real estate. So instead of having 2 separate switches, I went for a DP3T switch like Orange uses for some of their amps (or used to). But I decided to scrap the standby option all together. Switches don't like high voltage DC anyways.

So the more time you spend thinking things through before buying your parts will hopefully give way to a less stressful build. That's what I'm aiming for but we'll see what happens.

Right now, I'm working on the cabinet a bit still. I need to add a vent since I am mounting the tubes horizontally. So I should have details on that operation in the next day or so.