An illustrated guide to building an F5

Lol. I hope so. I fried my .47ohm resistors on one side because I guess I didn't know what to check for. (Low resistance, but there's three wires on a trimpot. As one side's resistance goes up, the other goes down, right? )

Do you have a dim bulb tester? If so, trust it.. I used a 25 watt and then a 75 watt bulb.. If the light stays on, especially with only one side hooked up, then there is a problem.
 
I think it's gonna be ok.

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Thank you 6L6. I'm lovin it.

I'm listening to a full DIY system now. 834 phono, frugal horns, F5 and a heavily modded Lenco and an Audiomods series 6.

It's the best system I've ever had.

The DIY audio community is awesome.

Isn't that a great feeling? I quit chasing a lot of expensive things, and still had my best system as well. Of course, there is good stuff to chase, real Pass Labs! But for mere mortals this is the stuff....

Russellc
 
After breaking my F5 down into a pair of monoblocks, I managed to fry the outputs in the one amp. Not sure how I did it exactly. I was aiming for about 1.55 amp bias. Was this a totally stupid idea? The things were barely getting hot. I've got more parts on the way, but I'd really like to avoid repeating this stupid mistake.
 
32V @ 1.55A is 50W. That's a lot, but not immediate-destruction levels....

That was my thinking too. They're on huge heatsinks and weren't getting anywhere near warm enough not to touch for any length of time. They were clearly making good contact with the heatsinks. I'm thinking I'm going to aim for 1.45 amp and go with that for a while and see how the old pair in the other amp hold up. They're idling just fine at about 1.55 amp even after letting it cool and powering it on a few times. Thinking I might have had a weak part that just gave up and took the other one out with it.