What’s on *YOUR* workbench?

Turns out if you follow the directions on the box website, crap h*ckin works.

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Used a crappy, bad board of mine, fake iCs, spline shaft pots and sacrificial resistor and caps to run some tests.

Indium says that their no-clean core solder should be set to 350°C. I was skeptical.

Did a test first at my 375°C standard temp with and without additional flux. Without the paste I put down the wetting is not great, but but terrible. Paste helped.

Then I did a test at 350°C, no additional flux, and
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No additional time on the heat even, I was just on my groove, only I didn't need a jagundaload of additional flux. Amazing.

The purple board (weird WB issues with my phone…) was a second test with it and it was easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Lesson learned: read the box
 
The most challenging part of my converting an older Tele to a 12 string: the bridges’ feed through the body hole locations are really different, and I need to connect the new holes to the ferrules on the bottom. This is gonna mean drilling at weird angles, and then also filling the old straight through holes with dowels that have a bevel ar the bottom so that the strings get directed up to the holes in the new bridge. At least the mess will get covered up by the bridge plate.
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Erik S said:
I decided no messing around this year. The PCB backlog is going to zero.

Next step in that process is drilling this mountain of enclosures.

Unfortunately I goofed the very first one. The upper LED hole for this Magnetron got one too many steps on the step bit.

This is the third time I’ve made one of these hole-correction bushings. I think it looks pretty cool, only problem now is I realize I should probably do the same thing to the other LED hole…

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I think the bushing looks great. Adds a touch of class.
 
joeyd said:
Question for those of you with home/office studios. Are you using loop switchers or just swapping out gear? I've been putting some preamps together. I prefer to have them always in my signal chain for convenience but the cable run is getting excessive. I'm about to do some board upgrades and I'm weighing options.
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I also use tube preamps for my amplification. I have 3 that I switch between and they go into the power amp section of a tube amp.
I use loop switchers to switch between preamps. Basically I put a preamp in its own loop. I've also had multiple amps set up this way as well.
You can build a passive one super easy with just a couple of parts. But I wanted an active one with level control to balance the levels of the preamps and I wound up buying this one. It was inexpensive, but works great. Completely transparent. I have two of them so I can juggle between 4 amps or preamps.

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MichaelW said:
I also use tube preamps for my amplification. I have 3 that I switch between and they go into the power amp section of a tube amp.
I use loop switchers to switch between preamps. Basically I put a preamp in its own loop. I've also had multiple amps set up this way as well.
You can build a passive one super easy with just a couple of parts. But I wanted an active one with level control to balance the levels of the preamps and I wound up buying this one. It was inexpensive, but works great. Completely transparent. I have two of them so I can juggle between 4 amps or preamps.
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I think the plan might be to drill many holes in a 1032L with loops on dpdt switches. Probably keep it passive. I keep wanting to make things more complicated but it seems unlikely that adding utility circuits like parallel blends or options for patching (this is in my head now) is going to make my recording better or easier.
 
DGWVI said:
What brand are those resistors?

The primary reason I use carbon film is their readability, but those bands are crisp and vivid
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They're KOA Speer MF series. I tried out a few of the lower price bracket options at mouser and these were my favorite. The leads seem to bend more uniformly with less difficulty and are a little thicker than Yageo or Royal Ohm, and solder flows through the joints nicer. Plus they look cool, which is always at least a small factor for me.
Edit: I think my phone camera also bumps up color contrast so the picture is a little deceiving.
Here's a gut shot with a regular camera and more accurate colors.
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KOA Speer MF do look cool and we all know that is where the TOANZ are!

I just did a quick mouser search for them and they are 2.5-5+ times the cost of Yageo depending on qty. Are they that good? Maybe I am too cheap? Or naive?



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pingpongcomputer said:
They're KOA Speer MF series. I tried out a few of the lower price bracket options at mouser and these were my favorite. The leads seem to bend more uniformly with less difficulty and are a little thicker than Yageo or Royal Ohm, and solder flows through the joints nicer. Plus they look cool, which is always at least a small factor for me.
Edit: I think my phone camera also bumps up color contrast so the picture is a little deceiving.
Here's a gut shot with a regular camera and more accurate colors.
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Click to expand...
 
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