The diyAudio Firstwatt F6

I visited this surplus dealer in person in the City of Torrence in Southern California: Apex Jr.Home Page

I found some wonderful heat sinks. I bought all nine of these. That's all he has. The heat sinks are 7" x 7.5" x 3".

I also bought a lot of the filter capacitors shown.

Maybe some of you can visit his warehouse too. Those heat sinks were not on his online catalog, since he didn't think he had enough of them to bother putting them on the online catalog. I was there, and I was lucky.

These let me realize my dream (as I mentioned in an earlier post) of putting all electronics in a small tight bundle to minimize wire lengths, and thus series inductance in those wires.
 

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I still think Nelson's Aleph 3 cases were the coolest looking cases I've seen.
I see!

My thoughts are that I'll build a monoblock, so it'll be like a Star Wars tie wing fighter, with the electronics bundled tight in the middle. The heat sinks will be the wings, one on each side. The power transformer will be situated some distance away, while the filter caps will be directly underneath the electronics. I can use a single power transformer with dual secondary windings, and put it in between the two monoblocks.
 

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just a general question - do u guys think its good engineering practice to have the PCBs parallel to the heatsinks like this?

There's in principle no problem if you consider the dissipation of each individual device at the resulting ambient temperature - approx 60 degrees with the right amount of bias. Most devices derate to half dissipation at that point, except resistors which maintain full power rating to 70 degrees, with some exceptions.

Caps would be happier with a PCB between them and the heatsink. They tend to dissipate (and pick up) heat from the jacket, so any kind of barrier between jacket and sink would help, plus the base is much less thermally conductive than the barrel. Hence the parallel mount method may in fact work better for them (for example).

50-60 degrees is usually not a problem for any device per se, but self-heating under circuit conditions - including stressed operation, need to be factored in.