/diy/ - Do It Yourself

Nah, nobody has ever built a guitar amp.

>>1697396
Leo Fender is a fucking conspiracy.
>>1697394
I haven't but do a lot of tube "hifi" stuff which is basically clean amp vs. dirty amp. Your question is difficult to answer as it's too open ended.
Pic unrelated.

>>1697394
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgxiqx9A_NU

>>1697394
>Anyone ever built a guitar amp? If so, share some knowledge
No, but I'm in the same boat where you are (or at least we're on the same sea or whatever). I have some experience fixing amplifiers and stuff like that, and I am planning to build one soon. I just need to determine what building techniques and form factor I am going to use. What do you want to know? Be specific.

>>1697394
yeah built a ~1.5W tube amp. it sounds sweet and plenty loud for playing at home

>>1697394
Many. My first was from the parts of my first amp and my scope, my second was from an old radio and my function generator. They taught me a great deal, I went on to learn a great deal about electronics and designed many amps in the following years and even did some custom work. Sadly, I had no interest in building clones or production and the local market is not large enough to support a builder of custom one offs, so my building has slowly fizzled out over the years.

One of the most important things I learned is that every amp has its strengths and weaknesses, if you try and 'improve' those strengths you generally also strengthen the weaknesses and make the amp into a one trick pony that does one thing well and a whole lot terribly. learn from the old designs, most are very well balanced and while having their own sound, they do not impose themselves on the musician. I spent years reworking my first amp, when I finally got it good, it was almost identical to the amp I gutted for it and ultimately I sat down and rebuilt that old amp almost back to stock, the only changes be a few slight tweaks to suit my playing style that almost no one would even notice.

Feel free to ask questions.

>>1697474
I'm not OP, but what are your takes on using an eyelet board over a turret board? I'm thinking of using the same G10 material that people use to make turret boards to avoid the moisture issues that many of the eyelet boards that were in early fender amps had. I would use turrets instead, mainly because they make the board look cleaner, but I feel that it is sort of frivolous and I could use the money better elsewhere in the project.

>>1697514
The moisture issues with the vulcanized fiber eyelet boards is massively exaggerated it is essentially a non-issue, but there is no real reason to use vulcanized fiber board when g10 and fr4 are only a couple dollars more in the amounts the hobbyist deals with. Having a stiff and rigid board for your eyelets or turrets is a good thing.

As for eyes vs turrets, turrets are slightly easier for down the road mods or repairs but eyelets are more forgiving to beginner technique and easier to set. They both are more production methods, proper point to point using terminal strips is technically the best, but it is very dependant upon the layout and wireing skills of the builder. Really, just pick the method that appeals to your senses the most, there is no technical reason for one or the other here, they are both more than adequate and the deficiencies each has, are easy to work with.

>>1697514
A little more on eyelets vs turrets vs point to point.

Modern resistors have thinner shorter leads than they had during the days of tubes, this can be problematic, especially for point to point. For turret and eyelet board you can move the eyelets/turrets a 1/4" closer together and will have enough lead length to make things easy. The standard width for these boards goes back to Leo, like most things amplifiers, he made the width of the board such that there would be no need for the assembly people to cut leads on almost all of the resistors, just install and solder. We can more or less manage this with the modern 1/2 watt resistor lead length, but it is easier if we decrease things by a 1/4" or so.

Eyelet and turret boards can be just as good as point to point, but things get silly, boards tend to get quite large if you want to get optimal tube layout and costs go up well beyond just using terminal strips.

Pic is somewhere around the the 12th iteration of the amp I made from the guts of my first amp, it has bits and pieces from all over the place. It was and exploration of the grid leak biased pentode preamp like the old Champ 5C1. Preamp tube is from a 6BA6 from a radio, that socket and rectifier socket, fuse holder and the green power resistor came from a Navy power supply, the lamp from that old scope, the power switch and power tube (6K6GT) came from the function gen, rectifier tube and power transformer came from the old amp, wire from an organ, knob from a old Harmony (H-205), jacks from an old peavey mixer (my first mixer!), and the chassis is the case from an old Teac tape deck, rest of it is new, was. Get experimenting people!

>>1697394
Isn't a guitar amp just a glorified op amp that runs to a speaker?

>>1697733
That depends.
They may or may not have additional filtering or signal processing.

Finishing up with my Tektronix LA2A tube compressor/limiter. Will post pics when I'm finished.

>>1697704
>>1697562
Thanks. I think I'm going to stick with the eyelet board. I already have a layout to follow for the design that I am planning to use, and it will make it easier to layout. It will also be the more affordable option out of all of them, since I have most of the parts to salvage from another amplifier which came out of a projector and has a bad form factor (enclosure is weird shape so it would be hard to fit it into a reasonable case.