Sorry to both of you who read this.. I’m keeping busy :-)
So where are we ? I built out my McTube clone and it actually worked. Here are a couple of pictures :
So yeah, she’s nice looking .. I’m a fan of the clean look. The back has the instructions / names of the controls. The three banana plugs on the top are for heater and plate voltages (recall that my power supply is separate).
Here are the guts.. quite a bit less nice looking :
So what happened here is I didn’t carefully lay out the components before hand. I ended up with a lot of bare wire crossing a lot of other bare wire and naturually got some interference. In fact. I got an AM radio station and had to tie some ground points together before I got a good sound.
How did it sound? Well, I plugged it into a crappy Frontman 15B (that I got for 13 bucks) and it sounded like a tube amp. Not a great tube amp, but a tube amp nonetheless. It would be very fun to A/B with this setup and a good solid state amp to really get a chance to play with the ‘sound’ of tubes.
For a distortion box, I would tweak it I suppose, because I don’t have anything that can give you that barely hanging on sort of distortion and this doesn’t get there, although it gets pretty close.
If I were to use this more often, it would need a complete rewire. I will probably consider it though because as always.. I have a plan
Have u thought to use dual tubes in the circuit to provide more distortion? They discuss it in the feedback section. I plan on building it with 2 12ax7 tubes and see if I’m happy with the results
I certainly thought about it.. that power supply can take it (just barely). In the long run it was really more of an experiment / practice build to prepare for the rebuild of a Crestline Skylark (which will start this week.. I need to get posting)
I’d like to hear / see how you build goes.