TONS of progress so far...
The SB4001 kit
Startin' with the Diodes.
Resistor Bag 1
Resistor Bag 2
Resistor Bag 3
Resistor Bag 4
Resistor Bag 5
All these leads are like a torture trap! All resistors are done tho!
Here's where I stopped for the night. Definitely took a big chunk out of the BOM
The next day, knocked out all the caps, etc.. This is all that's left.
Startin' to look like somethin..
And we're assembled!
At this point, i did the power up test with no smoke! Check out my awesome test rig lol ;D
However, the right channel was spitting out a TON of distortion, so I had to take the unit apart and figure out what was wrong. Before I disassembled it tho, I pulled out the first SB4001 i built and recalibrated that unit. She was pretty out of wack, now she's money! one hour later, I discovered that I had installed a 1646 Chip backwards near the gold PCB fingers, because I installed the Chip Socket backwards and didn't follow the silk screen when installing the chip. Chip flipped, unit reassembled 30 minutes later (I hate how long they take to dis/re-assemble) and we're calibrating away!
And we're fully calibrated!!
awesome. this build took about 15 hours, excluding the 2 hours finding the socket that was reversed. I should not have disassembled the whole unit in hindsight, but I thought I had missed a solder joint or somethin'... The next project for the weekend is to wire up the back of the rack so it can interface with a patchbay.
Finally, here is the current state of my rack!
I'm definitely ready to put down the soldering iron and make some music. Putting in 14+ hour days building this stuff can become mind numbing.
For the LA3A-500's, i already have the transformers from Hairball, so I just need to put together a BOM from Mouser and hit up Drip to see if he's developed his prototype T4B unit designed to fit Peter's PCB. This pair of modules will be my first actual DIY, because i won't be assembling from a complete Kit; I'll be picking and choosing parts myself