With some schematics from Nelson Pass, and more than a few helpful tips from the diyaudio community, this amp came together fairly painlessly in about 5 days. And, with my choice of quasi-adequate heatsinks, the amp not only drives speakers,
but can burn a fingertip off in mere seconds.

my, chris, what a nice protoboard you’ve got.

ah god! the horror!

The amp is powered by two el-cheapo “SIGNAL” transformers (7A at 48V each, I’m running the 230V models at 115, so there’s about 24V at the 48 tap. not bad for $7.50 a piece), going into one rectifier and filter section.  So, the amp is almost a dual-mono, except I only have one rectifier and cap filter section.  Actually, only one channel is done, so it’s a mono-mono.  Notice the clumped-on nature of the fan, which was put on in an effort to not make the amp so super hot.  It sort of works.

The fan’s a bit noisy, and being that my dorm room is, well, a room, I might have to convert my closet into the “amp room.”

Before I got the transformers, the amp ran on a separate variac, but now that the two are installed, the whole thing weighs more than anything. So, it’s both impractically heavy, and unreasonably hot.  yeah audio!

Finger-burning aside, the amp is pretty groovy.  I haven’t run it on any special speakers, but so far I dig how it sounds.  It’s pretty hum-free, and so long as the preamp isn’t overdriven, nice and clear.  I don’t have any fancy preamps lying around, so it’s been running off the “rec out” of an old receiver, sourced from the headphone out of a portable cd. player. When I get back to school, it can run off the preamp out of a DB-series Sony receiver, but I’m not sure that will change anything.  

My gratitude to Nelson Pass for his plans, and the people on diyaudio for their ready help.  And my dad’s shop-owning friend who welded the chassis. And Apex Jr. Surplus, for the cheapest, biggest transformers ever.

And what did we find that next morning?  No freakin cherries.  Like none.  From 100 to 0 overnight.  Apparently the squirrels knew that it was pickin’ time too, and they went to work.

So, the day all your fruit disappears, remember: picking day was yesterday.

Before the move, K went to Safeway every night for a week, and collected many apple boxes. Typically, we called ahead and reserved them, to pre-empt any other obsessive fruit-box collectors from nabbing our prize.

Apple boxes are well-proportioned, 6-sided, fully-lid-bearing storage containers. Often, they come goodies inside — foam, cardboard trays, and weird heavy paper; all of which serving only to enhance their utility.

One would think that other small, round fruits would also come in useful cardboard boxes; in our travels, we have been unable to confirm this. Perhaps the containers of those fruits are of higher quality than even the humble Apple, and that our supermarkets deprive us of their superior holding power. That, or the population requires apples with such zeal, as to dominate the distribution of used cardboard containers.

Banana boxes, I have less to say for. It would seem, bananas are shaped awkwardly-enough so as to not require a fully enclosed container to stay bundled together. As such, Chiquita saves cardboard by leaving a gaping hole in the top and bottom of their boxes. We’ve resorted to these in a times of need, and regret it still.

What do all of these have in common?

They’re all terrible at shoveling crud out of your gutters.

The unfortunate fact, IMHO, is that the best tool for de-funking your gutters is your hand. It’s nasty and cold and a vertible insect-love-den up there in those dark trenches, so some old gloves are a must, but my grabby fingers made the quickest work of this. Plus, nothing fills you with the pride of home ownership like a fistful of soggy detritus.

Point is, you don’t need to pay for cable if you just want to get your major network shows in HD. The reception (I think) over the air is actually slightly better than what I’ve seen on digital cable.

The directions from antennaweb.org probably would have helped if I actually had a compass; instead, I just set my tuner to the “signal-strength” meter, and spun the antenna around until the meter bars hit 99%.

Not everyone can have a blacksmith’s sinewy hands. My supple internet-fingers are no match for splinters or sheet metal edges, and I’ve found this out the hard way.

Now, wiser, I proclaim that there’s nothing pansy about wearing gloves. 6 bucks at Home Depot makes you a leather-palmed super-hero. Hot stuff? Sharp things? Sanding splinters via the sheer friction of your claw? Gloves, even the cheapest ones, make a huge difference in terms of enabling to manage material with confidence and comfort.

I’ve had good experiences with the cheapos, pictured. They’re a little flat when you first wear them, and the fingers are a bit fat, but the material is thick enough to keep from wearing through.

And like many things in construction, gloves are a material, and they wear out. I trash my gloves (another reason to buy the cheapos); by not worrying about getting paint, dirt, stain, or other nastiness all up in your gloves, you can focus on the task at hand, and not be distracted by keeping your dainty digits out of harm’s way.

We’ve cheated before, and just slapped on two coats of latex with no prime, and the results have usually been fine. The times we’ve primed, though, always turn out silky-smooth, with an even, solid feel to the final surface. The most important difference we’ve noticed is that primer evens out the sheen of the wall; without primer, sometimes little patches in your wall can show through the final coat because they’re more dull than their surroundings.

Un-primed surfaces, like raw drywall paper or mud, soak up primer like there’s no tomorrow. For us, the primer coat has always taken the longest, and uses about 50% more liquid. After that, putting on the two coats of latex is always way faster (we can tell because our arms and hands are less tired!).

This one flattened in a couple of days.

An instinct to carve giant teeth takes over, yet again.

A couple of wall members were completely chewed out by termites, so we had the whole place demo’d and re-drywalled so that the studs could be replaced. The house-facing walls got 5/8″ (for fire-resistance), and the rest 1/2″.

The walls got a skip-trowel texture and the floor was painted with an epoxy, to cover over the 9×9 asbestos tiles (which would have cost a fortune to have removed).

Both entrance doors were replaced; the house-side with a solid-core auto-closing unit, and the outside exit with a steel-coat door. The old full-panel garage door was replaced with a 4-panel rollup door.

Then, it was time to plan out the layout of benches and storage. My dad is a garage-engineering guru, so he helped us design, engineer and build the 100+ feet of (earthquake-proof) shelving, rack space and enclosed storage. There was not a small amount CAD employed.

What we’ve got now is primo…