Great progress Andrew!


And of course, no picture without a JEM now It just has to peak around the corner

Of course - it is NEVER more than 3 feet away from me

Actually I spent last week in the UK, and only had a nasty Strat Copy to play on - man it was sweet to pick up Galadriel again !

That cab looks really good Andrew-looks like an old fender, which can only be a good thing!

-Ben

This post has been edited by benhowell: Sep 24 2007, 11:08 PM

Your cab (besides being in tweed) looks about the same as my hot rod deluxe. It's going to be heavy

I love the tweed look cab - and yes its very much like the fender hot rod in appearance!

Yes, that was definitely the look I was going for

Update:

Busy few days ... Steve Vai was awesome and the trip to Atlantic city was a lot of fun. Work reared its ugly head however and I had to cancel most of my remaining vacation. This weekend however I made some progress. First, I assembled the drill press - not as trivial a task as you might imagine It was pretty cheap but does the job really well. Surprisingly, the laser is a lot more than a gimmick as it lets you pretty accurately place the thing you are drilling. I did a test drilling of some fibreglass board to see how it would work out. Went pretty well, but my holes were not in straight lines - the trick for that is to clamp a piece of wood to the press as a straight edge - I'll do that for the real board. Here is a pic of the assembled drill press, drilled board and the "X marks the spot" laser sighting.



Next step would be to place the turrets using the turret tool. Unfortunately however, although I have the tool there is no way to secure it in the drill press. I have ordered a drill press vise which should arrive in time for next weekend and I can try and fit a few turrets to make sure that is all ok. If that works out I'll drill a new board with the straight line technique and fit the turrets.

Looking good Andrew,
presumably the wood also helps stop the thing you are drilling twisting as the drill goes through?

Cheers,
Tony

I imagine it would, but I have this set to the lowest RPM and I didn't find that to be a problem.

Hi Andrew

Are you planning to build Reverb Into the amp ? If so, i need your help as well. I bought an old orange head that has no reverb built in and i want to build in a "vintage" style reverb module into it. Got any ideas ?

No plans for reverb in this one - addition of reverb requires addition of a tank and a couple of tubes. Its certainly possible but not for the faint hearted, and to some extent you would be treading on unknown territory, you would need to design the circuits yourself.

An easier option would be to split the pre and power amps and put in a couple of sockets for an effects send and route it through a digital reverb effect unit.

This post has been edited by Andrew Cockburn: Oct 15 2007, 07:56 PM

Dan Electro has this : Spring King . Or The T-Rex reverb or the EHX Holiest grail. Maybe i should just for that option inside the effects loop.

This post has been edited by Francis Viviers: Oct 15 2007, 08:47 PM

If you already have an effects loop, yes, this is by far the easiest option!

Update:

This afternoon I completed the turret board - hurrah! I'm now in a position to rebuild the board to the higher standard I crave. With the correct tools,amking the turret board turned out to be pretty easy, I would say an hour from start to finish. The first step was to accurately place the plan on the board as a drilling guide.



The drilling plan wouldn't actually fit on one piece of letter sized paper so I printed it in 2 parts and taped them together, then taped them to the board. Next step was to set up the drill press with a piece of wood for a guide to aid drilling in straight lines.



This worked pretty well in conjunction with the laser, and allowed me to quickly drill the board.



Much better than the test board, all holes are pretty much lined up. Note the slightly larger holes - these are screw holes to fix the board to the chassis.

As is always the case, my efforts to order everything I need online are doomed to failure. The drill press vice arrived but it come with no way to fix it to the press. A trip to home depot later, and I had a set of bolts that didn't fit the press either - duh However, knowing my predilection to fail embarrassingly to get the right sized pieces, I also bought some washers, and they ended up being a far better way to secure the turret tool in the drill press. With this in place it was an easy matter to insert the turrets and press them into place.



Finally, after half an hour of stamping I have a finished board.



I called it a day there - now I can go back to soldering the board, and wiring it to the chassis, another day!

For those of you that are interested in my continuing journey, future updates will occor on the new GMC Blog!

To jump straight to my entries, click here.

Check the blog for my latest update!

The amp looks SWEET Andrew! Congratulations!

Love to hear how it sounds!!

-Ben

Thanks Ben, I'll be working on recording it in the next week or two - I have a couple of capacitor mikes already, but would really like to try it with an SM58 and SM57 as well - I think I'll be eBaying in the coming weeks

Sounds great Andrew, cant wait to hear it. Perhaps you'll start your own boutique amp company?!

-Ben

Hey Andrew, I would really like to see that amp, but my browser don't open the pictures for some reason. Any ideas how to fix that?