I made things like this when I was 10 years old. I used the fat germanium transistor off of the back of a early 60's car radio and two 6 volt lantern batteries in series. I attempted to measure power by creating a constant tone in an electric guitar and measuring the AC voltage across the speaker. The circuit made about 1 watt. A ham radio guy explained the idle current through the speaker thing to me and convinced me to grab the transistor AND the output transformer from the next car radio I dismantled. This boosted the power output to about 2 watts. Some of those germanium transistors would handle three 6 volt batteries, some would not.
If you click on "about" he lists his country as United States. I'm guessing this is also about maximizing the revenue stream.
You are contradicting yourself. You didn't post diagnosis. "See, there's one reason why people post claims like that. It gets you attention, and you get to boast about all the wonderful things you own. Both of those are things narcissists love." That is a name calling of those who post claims like that. It would have been a diagnose (real doctor wouldn't use the approach that you used) if you wrote "that person is a narcissist" but you didn't.
Can we just move past this? This is getting tiresome.
Same here, my first transistor power amplifier (I had been into tubes earlier, what else?, and small transistor stuff based around OC71/72 or 2SB something) was he power section of a car radio, but using all new parts, using a TO3 Germanium (OC26? ASZ15?) and not exactly a "transformer" but a DC choke across the speaker, so it took care of that, and speaker got the Audio component.
Guess today that would be called paraphase or something.
Extra points for burning it repeatedly, until I was asked by the shop counter guy: "what kind of heat sink do you use?"
"heat .... what?" 😱
And yes, they got literally finger burning hot.
Here in DIY Audio we had quite a few threads by a Forum member, won´t name names but most will remember them, obsessed with single transistor DC-thru-speaker power amps, which he wanted to "improve", of course rejecting all sensible suggestions. (such as junking it and building a real one)
Oh well.
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Yeah, same here as well, glad those times are gone (at least from technical point of view and parts available).
Like these? I built this thing in high school (1969). It ran 6 mystery RCA transistors that were sold as "2N3055s" at a surplus outlet in Miami for 25 cents each. B+ was around 100 volts and came from a 75 volt 4.5 amp transformer. Power output was around 250 watts into a 4 ohm load at an unknown amount of distortion, probably about 10%. Its primary function was to annoy neighbors with my guitar playing through 8 ten inch speakers. It was driven by a DIY 5 watt tube amp running a 6V6GT. I was 15 or 16 when I made this. My only tools were a drill and a nibbling tool. The driver transformer was hand wound on the core of a Radio Shack filament transformer that I had fried. My construction skills have improved a little since them. I found this in a shed in 2006 after hurricane Wilma destroyed the shed. I had forgotten about it. I took these pictures, then stood back and plugged it in. One filter cap began spewing its guts, so I tossed it all into the trash.
I also found a small pair of the Disco era speakers I was building at the time. I made somewhere between 10 and 20 of these over a two year period and some big "bass thumpers" with a 15 inch Eminence speaker that was sold at the Olson store with the Olson brand where I worked. Latin Disco was already popular in Miami in the early 70's and a pair of bass thumpers worked well on the dance floor. They were often the only speakers in use. My brother and I made a lot of them. Note the resemblance to the Naugahyde and crushed velvet bean bag and waterbed products of the early 70's. We made speaker cabinets with scrap material from a bean bag / waterbed factory. The drivers are 6 X 9 car speakers obtained cheap when a local K-Mart closed down. These ate my guitar playing until the 40+ year old foam surrounds turned to dust, then went into the trash.
DIY is in my blood and will never go away until I leave this world. It's just a matter of what I am able to DIY. It's a safe bet that I built my last high performance car 20+ years ago and my projects will continue to get smaller and lighter as I get older......got to build that vacuum tube kilowatt amp while I can still lift it.
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The joy of a hobby is down to the individual and the attitude your bring to it, the expectations you have etc. If you can't get joy out of it, move on, no point bichin about it here.
That.
Matching tubelab ideas, I will also DIY up to the last day, God willing, and always joke I will build my own coffin .... out of Tolexed MDF of course, with metallic corner protectors, rubber feet or wheels, and with cabinet type strap handles.
Might even mount a small plate carrying a couple jacks or speakons, and of course a FAHEY logo plate 😉
Even a small plate stating "Fahey inside" like on many speaker cabinets bragging about drivers used, which of course would be true 🙁
Oh well.
Matching tubelab ideas, I will also DIY up to the last day, God willing, and always joke I will build my own coffin .... out of Tolexed MDF of course, with metallic corner protectors, rubber feet or wheels, and with cabinet type strap handles.
Might even mount a small plate carrying a couple jacks or speakons, and of course a FAHEY logo plate 😉
Even a small plate stating "Fahey inside" like on many speaker cabinets bragging about drivers used, which of course would be true 🙁
Oh well.
Well ,I just realized I like well made stuff and making something that sort of works didn't bring expected satisfaction. Sobering experience was pouring tons of money into projects using exotic parts which were superceded by relatively cheap commercial offerings. Now I just buy beautiful looking, approaching vintage age electronics which I could only dream owning in the past and repair or service to bring them back to life. What sounded great/good thirty years ago is still competently sounding today and my ears are not what they used to be. My unfulfilled dream is getting vinyl playback sounding acceptable. I poured tons of money in the playback and can't get no satisfaction or the feeling when I first heard a decent vinyl rig which was a revelation at that time . No I have a rig costing multitude more but the magic is absent .Oh well .
If you build something unique (e.g. your own design) and highly desirable (a piece of artwork), you will still find people who appreciate them.
If you just build something (e.g. a JLH1969 or QUAD clone) that anyone else can, then I guess you have to consider what distinguish you from the rest.
Building something you like / enjoy is subjective.
FInding someone who consider them unique and desirable less so.
Cheers,
Patrick
If you just build something (e.g. a JLH1969 or QUAD clone) that anyone else can, then I guess you have to consider what distinguish you from the rest.
Building something you like / enjoy is subjective.
FInding someone who consider them unique and desirable less so.
Cheers,
Patrick
Thank you Bigun. There is a good story behind - I was working on the Tamara project those days
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamara_passive_sensor
and there was a “gap” with free time - so I and a colleague of mine, a mechanical engineer, created this modular concept and ordered production of mechanical parts in our factory prototype workshop, masking it as a “Testing equipment” 😀.
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Right after the crystal radio phase, I started out with germanium PNP transistors salvaged from a dead pocket radio. It's been a lot of years, but I seem to remember AC128 and AC127 transistors.
I've lost all my childhood projects (including but not limited to electronics ones) during many moves. The oldest DIY project that I still have pictures of goes back to around 1986 or so - it's the home-made electric guitar in the pic. The neck and trapeze tailpiece came from a classmate's broken archtop acoustic guitar. I made everything else (including the pickups) from scratch.
That guitar had many faults, but I was the proverbial starving student with no money, so I played it for many years.
The second pic is a little headphone amp I made in late 2021, probably in December. I play electric guitar & bass through it from time to time. It runs off the same 9V supply as my guitar FX pedals, but there is an internal switching power supply module to drop power supply voltage to the audio amplifier board to 2.7 volts, reducing the chance of hearing damage by limiting maximum SPL in case of a loud "pop" from an unplugged guitar cable, etc.
The headphone amp has stereo inputs (for use with some of my stereo-output guitar FX pedals). The toggle switch on the top is a mono/stereo switch; if used with a mono input signal, flipping the switch sends the same signal to both left and right headphones. There is a volume control and 1/8" stereo output jack on the far side of the enclosure.
I typically use this headphone amp with one of my guitars and a Flamma Preamp pedal, followed by stereo reverb and delay pedals. Set to mono, it also works with a bass guitar plugged straight into either input. Somewhat to my surprise, even low B (30 Hz) from a 5-string bass works just fine with any of my cheapy headphones.
Both the DC to DC converter and the audio amplifier in this project were complete ready to go PCBs, so this was a very simple project. The DC to DC converter from Robotshop.ca is smaller than the fingernail on my ring finger. The stereo amplifier PCB from Digikey is the size of a postage-stamp.
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I'll probably stop a little sooner, when I completely lose my mind and can no longer tell a screwdriver from a soldering iron. 🙂
I like the idea of your guitar cab themed coffin. 🙂
For some of us, making, modifying, or fixing things is just a part of who we are, a part of life like breathing or eating. I'm sure a lot of us on diyAudio are like that.
Truthfully, I have a much harder time understanding people who never feel the urge to DIY anything, and instead turn themselves into passive consumers of stuff that other people make for them.
Every child I've known enjoys being creative and making things if given the opportunity. I guess some of us lose that impulse along the way, while others never do.
Descarte's said something to the effect "I think, therefore I am." For me, and for all of us who DIY stuff, it's more like "I am, therefore I create."
I'm lucky that my wife is also a creative person, so we understand each other well.
-Gnobuddy
Don't worry, when your mind no longer tells you which is which, your fingers will tell you which one is hot. About a year ago I decided to get the dental picks and unsheathed X-acto knives out of the tool tray. After a few surprises I have made it harder to grab hold of a live wire too. Hint, put a piece of large heat shrink over your dual banana plugs. Those little stubs of wire that stick out will cause temporary loss of vocabulary control when you try to yank the plug out of a power supply that set on 600 volt to stop an impending fireball. There will be no more kilovolt level builds for me. The 833As, the OPT, and the 1500 Volt 3/4 Amp transformer are already in the goodbye collection to be sold at the upcoming hamfest.
I have met kids who could care less about building anything. Back in the 50's and early 60's when I was into making stuff there were two kinds of kids who cared less. There were the kids who had another hobby or passion that they were really into. Back then it was playing sports, playing a musical instrument, fishing, scouting, hunting, gymnastics, dancing, academics, or some other competitive endeavor. The other kind of kid was the unmotivated, or undermotivated individual who didn't want to do anything.
As an adult I also interacted with many people, most of whom were engineers, who viewed electronics, computer programming, or mechanical engineering as just a job and often one they really weren't happy with. None of them had much inclination to use their skill set for fun, much less build anything. There were several people at Motorola who built their own high performance cars. Some of us raced them competitively too. All but one of them was employed in an electrical or software job. There was only one mechanical engineer in our group of motor heads. I noticed a similar distribution of amateur musicians at Motorola too, the guitar players were mostly electrical or software people.
Today there are far more diversions competing for attention in one's mind. How many good, possibly DIY capable minds have become addicted to the video game console, or worse?
In Los Angeles, a lot of the amateur guitar players I ran into were people still hanging on to dreams of being rich and famous via music. Some had been hanging onto that same dream for many decades, but still couldn't let it go. It was rather sad.
Here in BC, a lot of the amateur guitar players I run into think they are cowboys, and still worship country, folk, and cowboy music, and the singers they watched on TV five or six or seven decades ago, when they were little. 🙂
They say necessity is the mother of invention. Some years ago I had a student who had grown up in extreme poverty in the Phillipines, but fortunately ended up with a much better life after his mother married an American and moved to California. He was working on creative projects constantly, from completely re-wiring an old dead motorcycle and bringing it back to life, to slowly building a drag-race car as time and money allowed.
Here is the part relevant to your post: this young man told me he had a younger brother. Born in the USA, the younger brother grew up in relative luxury, with everything he needed or wanted given to him, and with a TV in front of him. He had no interest in any hobbies or creative endeavours; all he wanted to do was sit and watch TV or play video games, all day, every day. He didn't have a smartphone yet, but it seems likely that when he did get one, it would only lead to even more "screen time".
It's quite sad to hear about kids who've lost that human birthright, the urge to create.
-Gnobuddy
Don't know about others but i miss AndrewT & his posts.
My son got into video games when he was young and we worried about that becoming his sole pursuit in life. I felt much better the day I came home and him and his friend had hooked up the motion sensor from his Xbox to a Lego Mindstorms robot and programmed it so they could control the robot using hand gestures. His fun now frequently involves a soldering iron followed by programming.