Paleo-Electronics Blog » homebrew http://www.paleoelectronics.com/blog Clueless Idiots and High Voltage Vacuum Tubes Really Do Mix! Sat, 07 Aug 2010 16:52:09 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 The Real McTube wrap up http://www.paleoelectronics.com/blog/2009/10/the-real-mctube-wrap-up/ http://www.paleoelectronics.com/blog/2009/10/the-real-mctube-wrap-up/#comments Sat, 10 Oct 2009 18:17:09 +0000 Dilapidus http://www.paleoelectronics.com/blog/?p=156 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 :

IMG_0160

IMG_0161

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 :

IMG_0162So 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

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