I had pretty bad anger issues early in life but learned to control them well in my 20's. The TSE-II board that hit the wall was a rare collateral damage event that culminated from dealing with offshore phone support (not) used by two companies, neither of which offered anything but frustration. I had been on the phone or on hold for over four hours when they completely ditched me. I had been working with the TSE-II board off and on while listening to the same recorded tape loop of annoying distorted music on hold while attempting to solder some wires and a few parts into the board so I could use it to test a box of 5842 tubes that I will sell off (that too much stuff thing again). When the idiot who couldn't even find my account transferred me to a line with a recorded message saying "we're closed, call back tomorrow" then hung up, the anger struck, and the board flew. The humans in the local bank branch fixed it all in about an hour.
Under normal circumstances I know better than work on something when I'm mad at it, frustrated, or tired especially when high voltages are concerned. I also have a self imposed rule to shut off all high voltage stuff after 10 PM, since that's when I'm more likely to make a mistake. I am a morning person.
I have sometimes enjoyed purposefully killing a project that's obviously beyond hope, and sometimes I have been rewarded for doing so. Several years ago I was tinkering with a small vacuum tube guitar amp that I had designed and breadboarded. It technically worked, but just didn't have the sound that I wanted. Weeks of tweaking had produced minimal results, so I decided that "execution by power supply" was in order. All of the tubes in the amp were from an old line powered AA5 radio design and thus rated for 135 or 150 volts maximum. I decided that say 350 volts or so should do it in slowly, so I could watch it melt, so 350 volts it was. Surprise! The amp not only lived, it ROCKED! If it liked 350 volts, why not 400, the limit of the power supply I was using. 400 volts proved a bit much as the tubes overheated, but the amp played great on 350, so I put the supply on 350 and blasted it with my guitar playing for a few hours. It smiled, and so did I. That amp survives today in a slightly different circuit, but with the same tubes in it. Someday I will take it beyond the breadboard stage. Who knew that a pair of 50B5 tubes in push pull could make 20 watts on 340 volts and do it for 12 hours straight without issue.
All my hand tools power tools, cables, headphones, mics, soudncards, etc now fit in 155 liters. I have maybe another 5 liters of little fullrange drivers. Amazingly compact! Less than 1/2 the volume of one of my old woofers.
I'm a long time lurker in this forum/hobby/addiction but the circumstances changed. I came to DIY due to no money as a student. Got a job, got decent speakers and good electronics...it worked very well. Alot of projects on paper are already in the bin and somehow the way I listen music changed dramatically - especially since I got my lil kiddo. After a couple years of just reading I want to refresh my knowledge and the handcrafting bug is more biting than the audiophile one. I guess I just want to start to have fun and not challenging to find the ultimate setup. Let's see what these weird times let me do and don't...
I mainly DIY to save money and to make stuff you can't buy.
I couldn't find a 6 in 4 out speaker switch so I built one etc.
I couldn't find a 6 in 4 out speaker switch so I built one etc.
I was away from the hobby for a good number of years until Covid hit. I was at home more, with more time because I wasn't commuting as much. Also had more energy for the same reason!!
Anyway, over the last 2 years, I have cycled through every bit of kit I had built, improving each one, fixing minor niggles that were "good enough" at the time and so on. Its been really therapeutic. I also managed to build a few new projects - DACs, amplifiers and preamps and a phono stage or two. I really enjoy using them now on practically a daily basis...... While fixing up items can be frustrating as hell, it is also enormously satisfying when it works out. I'd like to think I am a better diyer now than I was 10 years ago.
Anyway, over the last 2 years, I have cycled through every bit of kit I had built, improving each one, fixing minor niggles that were "good enough" at the time and so on. Its been really therapeutic. I also managed to build a few new projects - DACs, amplifiers and preamps and a phono stage or two. I really enjoy using them now on practically a daily basis...... While fixing up items can be frustrating as hell, it is also enormously satisfying when it works out. I'd like to think I am a better diyer now than I was 10 years ago.
What can I say...
DIY audio and Electronics were my passion since I was a kid. On the other hand, since I finally have what I consider perfect audio system, I moved to other projects. May be in 10 years or so when my system gets physically old I will restart the quest and build another one. Meanwhile there are so many other things one can pursue and enjoy. Saying that I still enjoy working on audio projects when need comes. I am building tube guitar preamp for my son 🙂
DIY audio and Electronics were my passion since I was a kid. On the other hand, since I finally have what I consider perfect audio system, I moved to other projects. May be in 10 years or so when my system gets physically old I will restart the quest and build another one. Meanwhile there are so many other things one can pursue and enjoy. Saying that I still enjoy working on audio projects when need comes. I am building tube guitar preamp for my son 🙂
My DIY journey started around age 7 or so when my parents gave me an electric guitar for Christmas one year, but no amplifier. The salesman at the music store where I was taking guitar lessons told my parents it would be quieter so my father wouldn't hear me play it. Little did they know what that decision would bring. Sometime later my parents scrapped their Magnavox monophonic console record player when they upgraded to one with a tuner in it. It took the curious kid about 20 minutes to cut a guitar cable in half and connect its wires to the wires in the tone arm of the Maggie by twisting and lots of masking tape as I couldn't solder yet. My first DIY guitar amp was born. My first crude clone of a Fender Champ would come a couple years later when I talked a local ham radio guy into taking his younger brother's Champ apart so we could trace the schematic. It was built on a pine board using brass furniture tacks using parts from dead TV's found in the local trash dump which was my favorite parts store.
I built, or repaired from trash, just about every guitar and HiFi amp I had as a kid as it was the only way to get one. I built everything from stereo sets and guitar amps to music synthesizers using tubes, transistors, and primitive IC chips, as did a few of my friends. If it was in one of the popular magazines and someone was interested, we built one or more. This continued through the DIY "computer" phase in the mid to late 70's and expanded when I got the job at Motorola in 1973. There were lots of like minded people there who built stuff. If it was in the SWTPC or PAIA catalog, we built one, then cloned it multiple times. We built the MC6800 computer and every Tiger amp except the Tigersaurus as we couldn't get some of the parts.
Electronics DIY slowed and eventually ceased in the 70's and early 80's when I, and several of my friends got into photography and DIY'ing fast cars. The workbench that was once filled with mostly solid state audio amps now had a dissected automatic transmission sitting in the middle of it, and the spare bedroom was now a color darkroom. My audio rack had names like Phase Linear and Carver in it.
The Motorola plant now employed about 5000 people. IBM was 20 miles away and employed about 10,000. Employees were jumping back and forth between the two, so we knew something was up at IBM, but not exactly what. In the early 80's the IBM PC was launched, it was designed and mostly built at that plant. One day a friend and former Motorola employee shows up at my house with a trunk load of "stuff" he got out of a dumpster at the IBM plant. From that pile, I made 1 and a half IBM 5 slot PC's that ran at a blazing 4.77 MHz and contained 48K of ram with one floppy disk. He got the complete PC, and I got the other I built with a plywood case. This started me down over 20 years of DIY PC building. The PC clone business was growing faster than the intelligence of many builders, so my friends and I would visit the local stores, talk to their techie for a few minutes, and if the answers were right, we would offer to buy all of their "defectives" for about 10 cents on the dollar. PC stores were failing often, so we hit the auctions and close outs too. During the late 80's three of us were doing quite well making, repairing, and selling PC clones. We even had a slogan during the memory chip shortage driven by a popular song. "Get your mem'ry for nothin, and your chips for free" if you bought your PC from us. Most were sold at work, or school as I had started my college education at age 37. The automatic transmission had been replaced by computer hardware. All DIY was computer, music making stuff, or ham radio. The Carver and Phase Linear stuff still owned the stereo rack through the mid 90's. My music making rack had ARP and Korg written all over it except for the old DIY Tiger based amp. The darkroom was now a kid's bedroom.
In the late 90's I traded a car for a Scott 272 Laboratory Reference Amplifier and matching tuner. Once fixed, the Scott pushed all the Carver / Phase Linear stuff out of the rack. They would never see power again, and were given away when I left Florida. This was the spark that started Tubelab and some DIY vacuum tube guitar amp building.
Now, over 20 years later my hearing has degraded to the point where my systems are better than my hearing. There is no point in making the stereo any "better." There are still a few more ideas left to try in DIY tube stuff, but far more ideas yet to be realized in DIY music making, so I will gradually transition to making DIY synthesizer stuff and finish some DIY guitars and related stuff that were started 10 years ago in Florida. I now have separate workbenches for each. I actually have 3 work / test benches and a build station now. I have all the parts for a DIY vacuum tube kilowatt amp, but no real use for one. Will I ever build it? I don't really know at this point. I have never finished the high efficiency class A tube amp design that got published in a magazine nearly 15 years ago. It was too far ahead of it's time then, but now it still brings more curiosity in me than a 1 KW monster and will likely be a bigger engineering challenge. Will the DIY bug ever die? Doubtful. Will it change direction yet again? Probably. How far, and in which direction? Who knows.
I built, or repaired from trash, just about every guitar and HiFi amp I had as a kid as it was the only way to get one. I built everything from stereo sets and guitar amps to music synthesizers using tubes, transistors, and primitive IC chips, as did a few of my friends. If it was in one of the popular magazines and someone was interested, we built one or more. This continued through the DIY "computer" phase in the mid to late 70's and expanded when I got the job at Motorola in 1973. There were lots of like minded people there who built stuff. If it was in the SWTPC or PAIA catalog, we built one, then cloned it multiple times. We built the MC6800 computer and every Tiger amp except the Tigersaurus as we couldn't get some of the parts.
Electronics DIY slowed and eventually ceased in the 70's and early 80's when I, and several of my friends got into photography and DIY'ing fast cars. The workbench that was once filled with mostly solid state audio amps now had a dissected automatic transmission sitting in the middle of it, and the spare bedroom was now a color darkroom. My audio rack had names like Phase Linear and Carver in it.
The Motorola plant now employed about 5000 people. IBM was 20 miles away and employed about 10,000. Employees were jumping back and forth between the two, so we knew something was up at IBM, but not exactly what. In the early 80's the IBM PC was launched, it was designed and mostly built at that plant. One day a friend and former Motorola employee shows up at my house with a trunk load of "stuff" he got out of a dumpster at the IBM plant. From that pile, I made 1 and a half IBM 5 slot PC's that ran at a blazing 4.77 MHz and contained 48K of ram with one floppy disk. He got the complete PC, and I got the other I built with a plywood case. This started me down over 20 years of DIY PC building. The PC clone business was growing faster than the intelligence of many builders, so my friends and I would visit the local stores, talk to their techie for a few minutes, and if the answers were right, we would offer to buy all of their "defectives" for about 10 cents on the dollar. PC stores were failing often, so we hit the auctions and close outs too. During the late 80's three of us were doing quite well making, repairing, and selling PC clones. We even had a slogan during the memory chip shortage driven by a popular song. "Get your mem'ry for nothin, and your chips for free" if you bought your PC from us. Most were sold at work, or school as I had started my college education at age 37. The automatic transmission had been replaced by computer hardware. All DIY was computer, music making stuff, or ham radio. The Carver and Phase Linear stuff still owned the stereo rack through the mid 90's. My music making rack had ARP and Korg written all over it except for the old DIY Tiger based amp. The darkroom was now a kid's bedroom.
In the late 90's I traded a car for a Scott 272 Laboratory Reference Amplifier and matching tuner. Once fixed, the Scott pushed all the Carver / Phase Linear stuff out of the rack. They would never see power again, and were given away when I left Florida. This was the spark that started Tubelab and some DIY vacuum tube guitar amp building.
Now, over 20 years later my hearing has degraded to the point where my systems are better than my hearing. There is no point in making the stereo any "better." There are still a few more ideas left to try in DIY tube stuff, but far more ideas yet to be realized in DIY music making, so I will gradually transition to making DIY synthesizer stuff and finish some DIY guitars and related stuff that were started 10 years ago in Florida. I now have separate workbenches for each. I actually have 3 work / test benches and a build station now. I have all the parts for a DIY vacuum tube kilowatt amp, but no real use for one. Will I ever build it? I don't really know at this point. I have never finished the high efficiency class A tube amp design that got published in a magazine nearly 15 years ago. It was too far ahead of it's time then, but now it still brings more curiosity in me than a 1 KW monster and will likely be a bigger engineering challenge. Will the DIY bug ever die? Doubtful. Will it change direction yet again? Probably. How far, and in which direction? Who knows.
I have been into DIY since my teen years. Starting with ham radio, quickly displaced by cars and hotrodding. DIY has been a way to afford things that would otherwise be financially out of reach all my life. I have rebuilt cars, boats, old stone cottages, old stationary engines, furniture, and garden machinery. I most recently built a pair of 3-way floorstanders that I love. While most of the people around me just reach for a credit card when something stops working I reach for my extensive tools collection and get down to business. At 75 I'm mowing about 7000 sq. metres with petrol lawn tractors I have rebuilt from abandoned wrecks. I buy cars for less than some people pay to get a dealer service. DIY has always been a way of life for me. I'm not over impressed by the youngsters today than couldn't grab their own backside with both hands, and have to download an ""app" to find out which way the wind blows.
You should have that for safety, if nothing else.
Been doing this since I was 12, and am not going to stop now. I'm doing better work now than ever.
I go in cycles, build a house (takes a while), then work on the cars or motorcycles, then work on audio projects. As I burn out on one area I grow in another. Finished my house, finished a couple audio projects, back to fix the motorcycle and the front gate of the house then back to restoring the 93 Corvette.
I lost interest on the house a couple days on the 22 month project, but wanted my sound room done so I had incentive to keep going, and a nagging wife. 🙂
Audio system is done, for a while, so now I am thinking about the next audio project while working on other stuff.
Variety helps with the burn out. It's all about what do you want most, that's how I get motivated.
I lost interest on the house a couple days on the 22 month project, but wanted my sound room done so I had incentive to keep going, and a nagging wife. 🙂
Audio system is done, for a while, so now I am thinking about the next audio project while working on other stuff.
Variety helps with the burn out. It's all about what do you want most, that's how I get motivated.
I've been working on one thing or another since the pandemic had us on the first lockdown. I'm still going strong.
I got rid of every last bit of audio related stuff pre pandemic because we were planning a long distance move that's changed. Full 2.2 system rebuilt.
The build has been going pretty good up to now. I caught up on components before having a place to put them and needed a stand asap. The flexy I copied was a bit of a rush job last month but it turned out not bad.
I'm adding a top tier to it today to hold two separate Hypex modules since they wont fit the sub boxes there intended for. They will sit flush and cleanly with the blonde veneer surface. I like this idea better.
I got more done, and I have a list of things that need doing. In perfect timing with the up coming warm up. Ripping plywood outside is so much nicer 😉.
I got rid of every last bit of audio related stuff pre pandemic because we were planning a long distance move that's changed. Full 2.2 system rebuilt.
The build has been going pretty good up to now. I caught up on components before having a place to put them and needed a stand asap. The flexy I copied was a bit of a rush job last month but it turned out not bad.
I'm adding a top tier to it today to hold two separate Hypex modules since they wont fit the sub boxes there intended for. They will sit flush and cleanly with the blonde veneer surface. I like this idea better.
I got more done, and I have a list of things that need doing. In perfect timing with the up coming warm up. Ripping plywood outside is so much nicer 😉.
