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Post by thetragichero on Dec 27, 2018 22:18:53 GMT -5
had to bid farewell to this guy today after taking apart the 1590a-enclosed 24v wall wart to 12v and 9v pedal power supply because I wasn't getting any voltage readings, and then scratching my head because the wall wart want getting voltage readings, and getting a bunch of false continuity readings, I changed the 9v and tried again and got the same things (including a 330ohm resistor giving me an out of range reading), I have reached the conclusion that this guy is no longer working on the plus side, looks like I finally have a excuse to purchase an LCR meter!
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Post by thetragichero on Dec 28, 2018 13:50:24 GMT -5
pedal/amp/guitar tinkering on hold until the lcr meter arrives, so in the meantime I've started on a speaker box for under the bench seat in my truck I have two 6.5" mid bass drivers I had installed in my old kia, a $20 8" woofer, and a 4 channel amp I purchased at a pawn shop. figured this would be a decent test run before I try to make a couple guitar enclosures for some organ pull speakers
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Post by thetragichero on Jan 4, 2019 19:19:25 GMT -5
my multimeter is back from the dead! apparently the fuse blew, and there was a spare inside!
good thing since the lcr meter I purchased measures neither voltage nor continuity, which is what my meter is mostly set to
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Post by thetragichero on Jan 7, 2019 11:42:04 GMT -5
just potted the pickups putt of my 85 roadstar ii rb850 bass in a mixture of paraffin and bees wax packaged up 2 celestion seventy 80 speakers I some on eBay to buy a hipshot kicka$$ to replace the corroded bridge off the bass (who woulda thunk that plating layers of different metals would react shop badly with moisture/salts in sweat to turn a bridge into something resembling a battery...) added another hole because I'm going to use the 2sk117 version of this preamp circuit to turn this into an active/passive bass my first bass is getting much-needed tlc!
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Post by thetragichero on Jan 8, 2019 17:33:28 GMT -5
working on getting this into this (for those with keen eyesight: no jack yet and missing most of the wiring, including pickups. testing for fit as I go) hopefully I won't need to remove anymore wood
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Post by thetragichero on Jan 9, 2019 13:20:38 GMT -5
hipshot kicka$$ bridge came today so I installed it I saw on the talkbass forum where somebody restoring one of these sanded off the raised portions of the truss rod cover and I thought the brass and black would tie into the black bridge with brass saddles (got a good deal on ghs infinity steel strings so when they come this'll have red strings lol) undecided on whether or not to get new wood screws for the neck or keep the originals
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Post by thetragichero on Jan 9, 2019 18:02:06 GMT -5
couldn't figure out why no sound was coming out, even in passive mode (okay, a lot of hum) luckily I have a whole house worth of rotting subfloors so I started beating the rotten wood in the room I'm currently renovating with a sledgehammer hopped into the shower and eureka! I realized that I had connected the battery ground to the output jack but did not connect the output jack ground to the rest of the circuit ground now it works as a passive bass but currently active mode sounds like a sick fuzz face
but this is progress!
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Post by thetragichero on Jan 20, 2019 10:18:05 GMT -5
my girlfriend works for a drop in center, which is a place for people with mental illness to hang out and socialize and whatnot she's filling in today for a coworker who is in the hospital so I tagged along because they have a music room and a mini Marshall mg stack that took a tumble and ever since there was no way for the onboard fx to be turned off. the fx level pot reads 4-5 ohms when it should be zero, so I'm replacing it and hoping that helps while I'm under the hood I'll beef up the power supply filtering caps as well because I have extras from the mg head I've been working off and on on
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Post by thetragichero on Feb 3, 2019 0:32:16 GMT -5
spent a couple days at the hospital with my better half (planned surgery, she's doing great), which gave me the opportunity to research some pedal mods. one of the members at her work brought his pedals in a duffle bag with instructions to "make them sound good." so the through hole pedals will be fiddled with, the smd ones who knows lol, and I'll throw together a pedal board. since I'm a part time nurse until my future mother-in-law arrives next Tuesday or Thursday, I've got the time the green screamer is a ho hum tube screamer clone. increased input cap, put stock clipping diodes on dpdt on/on/on switch with some leds, and socketed the op amp (ended up with the stock tl072 soldered on top off a 1458, that have the best sound in my unscientific test - it's the one that sounded good and made me want to continue riffing) currently finishing up a bunch of mods on a dod grunge pedal. this thing sounded terrible stock (gyrator calculator tells me that this was "designed" with a 10khz quarter octave bump... weird.... new values give me approx 4 octave bump at like 760hz... I think that will be much more useful), so just about anything would be an improvement. there were an awful lot of reasonably small value (220nf-1.5uF) tantalum and electro caps in the signal path, so I've replaced them with film or ceramic, whatever would fit. will test in the morning
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Post by thetragichero on Feb 8, 2019 13:45:49 GMT -5
so I strip consumer electronics for parts before throwing them out (I have used some IR LEDs in clipping circuits to good effect), and ended up with this dip switch. I'd been trying to figure out how to make an op amp big muff out of the mc1458 chips I salvaged. some web searching led me to believe it just needed to be hit with a stronger input signal, and I've never made a rat so... I breadboarded a rat between the input buffer and first gain stage, leaving out the tone controls. I figured 3 knobs and a clipping diode toggle were more than enough controls for the outside of a dirt box, but that the option for attenuating the high frequencies would be valuable. so this is an adjustable high pass filter based on the rat filter control. corner frequency is adjustable from 439hz up to 8510hz, or zero attenuation with all switches off. felt this was the best way to accomplish high cut without another control crowding the face. now to figure out the corner frequencies so I can make a chart
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Post by thetragichero on Feb 14, 2019 13:06:24 GMT -5
here is the schematic for the rat into muffin that made use of some MC1458 i salvaged. doesn't show the dip switch filter that will be inside the box. waiting to finish the box before i can wire it up and test out the completed build
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Post by thetragichero on Mar 1, 2019 15:50:18 GMT -5
tested spraying water based poly on a cheap start neck. was going for a blue burst, plus learning what to do and not do for when I spray the Warmoth strat body and headstock that was my #1 for awhile. I'm satisfied buddy of mine ordered basically a high gain tubescreamer kit from abominable electronics for like 85 bucks and had me assemble it for him. there was an additional pcb for a simple j201 booster so I threw that in front to make the ts get super crunchy. sounds good for heavy stuff, but I would never pay that much for an assembled dirt box
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Post by thetragichero on Mar 6, 2019 10:07:28 GMT -5
last started my first 1590a pedal build (if previously used them to turn wall warts/old laptop supplies into pedal board supplies), transferring what is basically a Si fuzz face with an adjustable low pass filter on the front end (ditched the cap switching because breadboard tests showed it was a waste of components) from my breadboard it might actually fit in there when I'm done
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Post by thetragichero on Mar 11, 2019 0:43:42 GMT -5
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Post by thetragichero on Mar 24, 2019 12:10:07 GMT -5
estate sale finds: rasp, file, two ratcheting wrenches, tin full of carbon comp resistors total cost: three bucks there were a bunch of tube radios that I would've been interested in were they $10 but not the $50+ as they were marked
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Post by thetragichero on May 26, 2019 23:30:31 GMT -5
haven't updated this in awhile. I've picked up my third free organ. the power supply/amp chassis looks like it will be perfect for either a combo amp build or a small head two cts alnico 12s and one 6x9, plus whatever is going on in the Leslie section (other organ i got also had a Leslie. they'll be put into boxes at some point) i have more wire than i could ever use (not including from this most recent organ)
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Post by thetragichero on May 27, 2019 18:00:55 GMT -5
maybe you were curious about what was going on in the leslie, maybe you were not.... THIS WAS GOING ON IN THE LESLIE from what i have read the jensen c10n is the holy grail of 10" speakers for fender combo amps (princeton/princeton reverb). playing my 5 watt pico valve head through this to test it, i can see why. got great articulation even playing with high gain i did not intend on becoming a vintage speaker retailer but between this and the 4 speakers i purchased off craigslist for fifty bucks that's exactly what has happened... also found a pair of germanium pnp power transistors (2n555) on the driver board for the leslie. no idea what to do with them yet
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Post by blademaster2 on Jul 25, 2019 20:45:14 GMT -5
I have mentioned in a few posts here and there that I replaced the stock pickups in my Washburn solidbody guitar (an MG-821, Mercury II Series) with Seymour Duncan Black Winter pickups. I had these recommended to me by a thrash metal guitar player friend of mine. The Washburn guitar is very well built and with excellent hardware (really, only the pickups were deficient), and it set up with incredible action and plays extremely well. Really, these guitars are underrated in my view and the quality is far better than many guitars of higher value. The new pickups needed to be 'trimmed' at the metal base so that they would fit into the Washburn routing (corner radius was larger than the route, and the tabs were slightly too wide), and I also needed to slightly enlarge the width of the route but this only required sanding flat the little bit of lacquer overspray at the edges. Once that was done the new pickups 'barely' slid into place. A beautiful fit. This guitar had no pickup rings and instead bolted its original pickups directly into the body, so I did the same with the new pickups. As a result they new ones sit a little low and I needed to adjust the pole heights up so that the distance to the strings was smaller to get a reasonably strong signal (although the Black Winters are very hot and it sounded fine before I raised the poles). I expect that body-mounted pickups will have more "body wood tone" in the result and some (including Van Halen himself) claim that it sounds better. No, I do not expect to hear any difference blindfolded, but it likely does have more resonance when I play it. Wiring-wise, I used the existing coil split switch in the guitar (which had only worked on the original bridge pickup) and wired both new pickups with coil split capability. That was a good call, since it was very easy to do. Results: The new sounds that the guitar can make are amazing. Compared to standard HH (Les Paul) or SSS (Stratocaster) types of guitars, this guitar now has more variety in sounds and the differences in the various options are all very usable. These so-called 'metal' guitar pickups are very clean, and provide tone that lends themselves to a wide variety of playing styles.... and definitely my friend was right: these pickups can indeed do well in creating that "melt-your-face-off" thrash metal sound when desired, but they can also do so much more. I am very, very pleased with them. Photos follow:
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Post by thetragichero on Jul 25, 2019 23:41:41 GMT -5
I've got a washburn lyon series strat-style neck i purchased on eBay and it's lovely. i dig thin necks like it
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Post by thetragichero on Jul 30, 2019 10:24:28 GMT -5
i just keep picking up organs to strip....
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Post by blademaster2 on Jul 30, 2019 12:14:24 GMT -5
Oh man! Lots of fun there, but if I had a stash of stuff like that my wife would freak!
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Post by thetragichero on Jul 31, 2019 10:41:29 GMT -5
I've never played a ds-1 so when i saw one for a good price in like new condition on Craigslist i jumped at the chance to play/mod a classic distortion pedal turning up level and distortion with the tone control at noon get a perfect slam metal sound - CLASSIC! r3 to 6k8, r21 to 8k2 (little more gain from the buffer, stages just so it 'sucks tone' less) r7 to 330k (lowers durst booster stage gain to tighten up the low end) r13 to 1k, c8 to 1uf (increase max gain level) d4 to green led, d5 to jfet (louder, asymmetrical clipping... i used 2sk117gr or fakes labeled as such because that's what i have) c1 to 100nf, c2 to 470nf, c5 to 100nf, c13 to 68nf, c14 to 1uf all film (increase bass response, lower noise getting the electro caps out of the signal path) c9 to 220nf (slightly less bass before the clipping diodes, plus getting the electro cap out of the signal path should help with noise) c23 to 220uf (i just like bigger caps on the supply rails) plus a super bright blue led (people seem to like changing the leds on these - myself i prefer having the pedal look stock but sound incredible)
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Post by reTrEaD on Jul 31, 2019 23:23:38 GMT -5
i just keep picking up organs to strip.... Hence your custom user title. Lots of good parts and subsystems like 6V6 power amps from those puppies. But they are heavy to move!
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Post by thetragichero on Aug 8, 2019 8:07:46 GMT -5
I've been picking up solid state organs because 1. they're free and 2. I've been having a love affair with old solid state guitar amps, so this is a departure in that it's tube and i paid money (half of what it was listed for on Craigslist) 1950s (speakers dated 25th and 26th weeks of 1957) hammond l112-a with original tubes. I've already found three schematics to draw ideas of what it will become, basically a vox preamp with a class ab power amp (the el84s are already in push/pull configuration so why reinvent the wheel, eh?) I've already ordered a bunch of axial electro caps (needed to stock up for repair work anyway), now to try to clear some projects so that I'll be able to focus on this
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Post by sumgai on Aug 8, 2019 13:02:57 GMT -5
trag,
You found EL84s in there? Shoulda been 6BQ5s. Electrical specification differences between the two tube types isn't much, but Hammond wasn't in the habit of buying tubes from overseas manufacturers, back then - costs, and all that jizz-jazz, ya know.
sumgai
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Post by thetragichero on Aug 8, 2019 19:51:59 GMT -5
you are correct on the 6bq5 tubes. just calling em el84 because that's a common guitar tube (sorta like the eh 6ca7 tubes i bought for an el34 amp). let's just call it translating from organ to guitar lol
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Post by sumgai on Aug 8, 2019 22:53:14 GMT -5
you are correct on the 6bq5 tubes. just calling em el84 because that's a common guitar tube (sorta like the eh 6ca7 tubes i bought for an el34 amp). let's just call it translating from organ to guitar lol Well, I guess that 'translation' isn't so tragic..... sumgai
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Post by sumgai on Aug 15, 2019 21:52:41 GMT -5
That's been re-tubed, guaranteed. For the reasons stated above. Everything else looks pretty clean too, so I wonder if someone hasn't "breathed upon" this baby, sometime in the not-too-distant past.
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Post by thetragichero on Aug 15, 2019 23:01:29 GMT -5
even though all the tubes had Hammond screened on them? seller mentioned he had recently oiled the tone wheel so of course there was more schmutz inside than i would've liked. my first tone wheel organ so i wouldn't know if he did a good job or not. fairly clean besides that
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Post by thetragichero on Aug 27, 2019 22:31:44 GMT -5
i dunnno, some weird capacitor bondage or something? this is among the stuff to be replaced lol
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