TH Black Eye (Soldano GTO) prototype build

Am I the only one who gets all unreasonably anxious when the package is "late"? (not delivered ahead of the ETA)
Your anxiety levels would be out the roof over here..

Mouser ETA 3 days. Actual time 10 days.
Tayda (DHL) ETA July 3rd. Actual time, still in customs now.

Don't get me started with my PedalPCB orders across the pond. I get blue balls every time.

I am writing a new book, Pedal Building in the EU and the Art of Zen.

On the plus side, finally got some Lumberg KLBM in stock over here, so I got that going for me.
 
I’m about 1.5 hours away from Mouser’s Houston warehouse so I normally get things the next day.

I really need to learn how to design my own artwork. I will probably end up getting Adobe illustrator for awhile since there are so many tutorials for it.
 
I really need to learn how to design my own artwork. I will probably end up getting Adobe illustrator for awhile since there are so many tutorials for it.
I think you can get by with Inkscape and Affinity Designer. I’ll let you know once my Tayda order comes in.

The process was a pretty good one for me, I haven’t seen the results yet though.
 
I think you can get by with Inkscape and Affinity Designer. I’ll let you know once my Tayda order comes in.

The process was a pretty good one for me, I haven’t seen the results yet though.
I’d like to know about that. I worry that they can’t handle AD files.
 
I’d like to know about that. I worry that they can’t handle AD files.
Aah Affinity Designer.. it’s not about AD files, it’s about exporting the pdf correctly. You can check the pdf layers with Adobe reader. I think the main problem in the past is that people mess up the pdf layer part.
 
I’m not sure what an AD file is.


That would make sense to drive their enterprise sales. It would completely kill competition.
Yeah, the idea is that the people who pirate it wouldn’t pay for it anyway, and if there’s free competition available, non-paying customers will migrate to that instead. By having it be free, it makes it so more people will use it instead of the competition, and once they’re adept at it, they’ll be more likely to work jobs where the company then has to pay for an expensive multi-use license. As it stands, most young graphic designers got their start with pirated copies of the Adobe suite, so if the next generation of graphic designers wind up learning on a different software instead, it’ll be lost commercial license sales down the road.
 
Yeah, the idea is that the people who pirate it wouldn’t pay for it anyway, and if there’s free competition available, non-paying customers will migrate to that instead. By having it be free, it makes it so more people will use it instead of the competition, and once they’re adept at it, they’ll be more likely to work jobs where the company then has to pay for an expensive multi-use license. As it stands, most young graphic designers got their start with pirated copies of the Adobe suite, so if the next generation of graphic designers wind up learning on a different software instead, it’ll be lost commercial license sales down the road.
That’s basically the Windows playbook from the 90s and early 2000s.
 
They made CS4 free a bit ago. I’d be surprised if they provided full capability versions since they’ve gone all-in on the subscription model. But I’m certainly willing to be surprised.

Yeah, the issue with affinity is not that it can’t produce usable files, it’s that many people weren’t/aren’t applying spot colors nor exporting correctly. For a bit, tayda was correcting errors or sending people a heads up, but that is in no way sustainable.
 
Am I the only one who gets all unreasonably anxious when the package is "late"? (not delivered ahead of the ETA)

UPS won't do it. If a package gets here days ahead of the delivery date they will actually hold it at the hub until the ETA.
Biastards!
 
To my surprise all the parts showed up today and I just finished getting the Black Eye together. It sounds great until I turn the gain up about half way and then it starts feedbacking non-stop. Any ideas?
 
To my surprise all the parts showed up today and I just finished getting the Black Eye together. It sounds great until I turn the gain up about half way and then it starts feedbacking non-stop. Any ideas?
With the caveat that I know very little about tube circuits other than how to read a schematic and how to build them, could it be a microphonic tube or a loosely inserted tube? If you give the enclosure a few taps with a screwdriver or something else fairly hard, do you get any sort of response in the signal?
 
With the caveat that I know very little about tube circuits other than how to read a schematic and how to build them, could it be a microphonic tube or a loosely inserted tube? If you give the enclosure a few taps with a screwdriver or something else fairly hard, do you get any sort of response in the signal?
Tried swapping tubes and made sure they were fully inserted with no change. I had a couple of tube shields laying around so I tried sliding them over the tubes which helped quite a bit but something still doesn’t seem right.
 
To my surprise all the parts showed up today and I just finished getting the Black Eye together. It sounds great until I turn the gain up about half way and then it starts feedbacking non-stop. Any ideas?
Same issue without a guitar signal?

Trying to rule out single coils or similar.
 
To my surprise all the parts showed up today and I just finished getting the Black Eye together. It sounds great until I turn the gain up about half way and then it starts feedbacking non-stop. Any ideas?
Common things I see in tube circuits are:
  • power supply not providing enough current (make sure it can supply at least 600mA)
  • tubes oscillating, in which case a tube shield with a spring inside helps a lot
  • noise from not being inside a grounded enclosure
Just a couple thoughts, things to look at. Let us know if you figure anything else out.
 
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