Sucka (Pt 2)

 

Looks a bit surgical, doesn't it.

It's a combination of one of those crappy solder sucker things and a cheap soldering iron.  The bit has a hole in it and the idea is to prime the suction pump, heat up the workpiece with the iron, then press the yellow button, sucking and loose solder through the hole in the bit.

Takes an age to heat up and smells of burning plastic.  But for £4.95, it does an admirable job of removing solder.  Short of a continuous vacuum desoldering iron (£60+) there's nothing better that I've found.

Sucka (Pt 1)

Pliers, strippers and snippers

Here's the selection that I use regularly:

 

Clockwise from top left:

Strippers - a recent purchase.  Cheap, feel cheap, but work well.

Big pliers - Wickes special.  Good for big jobs or just weighting things down.

Needle-nose pliers - Good for bending loops in wire for turret soldering.  Stolen from my pal Tom who's now bought a replacement so I'm keeping them.

Draper multi-snippers / strippers / benders - over-engineered and overpriced.  I rarely use them.

Stripper / side cutters - crap for wire stripping and poorly made (this is the second set after one of the cutting blades sheared off the first one).  I've not found a better pair of light duty side cutters though.  Great for trimming components legs from PCBs when you want to get a really neat finish.

Wiring the Power Transformer (Big Iron Part V)

Finally I've tackled the power transformer wiring.  It wasn't difficult, just fiddly.  There's nothing massively complicated about cutting eight wires to length, stripping, tinning and soldering them to something else, but getting it to look neat, getting the twists in the right place, and generally not f'ing it up took a bit of concentration.

After all, if I fuck this up then something's going to go pop.  Possibly me.

1973 Master Reverb 18w Combo

If the 1973 Lead & Bass Combo is as rare as hens' teeth, then the 1973 Master Reverb 18w Combo is the proverbial rocking horse shit.

I can't find any other pictures anywhere on the web.  From the looks of it, it's lost the tremolo channel and it's using  the valve in the V1 position for the reverb drive / recovery.  (According to Dr Tube it's an ECL86.)

Intriguing.  With just a couple more pictures, I could almost figure out how it's all wired together.

How a valve is made

This is a fantastic video about the manufacture of valves in the Mullard factory in Blackburn.

It starts with an description of the parts that make up a valve and runs through the entire manufacturing process.

At 15:32 there is a view of the automated ECC82 assembly line.

21 minutes in there's a explanation of how the valve bases are made and some fantastic automatic glass melting / forming machinery.

I also like the lack of dumbing-down in this film, and the assumption that the viewer is intelligent and informed.  How many Discovery Channel programmes would dare to use the line:

"You will remember that during the manufacture of the heater wire, the fine tungsten filament was wrapped around a molybdenum core which served as a mandrel during the winding and as a support during the subsequent operations."

Brilliant!

Normal channel shielded input wiring

Extremely fiddly.  Made worse by the fact that the chassis is bloody heavy now I've got the power transformer in there.  I should really take that out until I've done everything else.

Pleased with the result though.  The shielded cable has two cores so I used one each for the hi and lo inputs.  Hope that's not going to cause problems.