Has anyone ever built a bread board for tube amps?

[teletwanger48]

I have been thinking about building a bread board of sorts for test building tube amps. Has anyone done this or seen it done? I would love to hear your ideas and opinions.

Thanks

[Enzo]

Here, read through this thread:

http://music-electronics-forum.com/t32498/

[Chuck H]

Very early in my learning there was a repair tech that told me: "If you build on a bread board and it sounds perfect, stick the bread board in the chassis. changing the layout could change the tone or performance." And he was right. In general it's not a bad thing to test circuits in an unintrusive way. But things can change if a circuit is redesigned even physically to incorporate it into a design.

[Mick Bailey]

I breadboard any new designs and experiment quite a bit, so a breadboard is a great help. It's just a U-shaped aluminium chassis (in reality cut from the side of my Landrover when I fitted side windows - so its Birmabright alloy) with octal, noval and UX5 sockets (for 807s), holes for pots and switches, plus a kludge area of breadboard matrix stuck on with double-sided tape. All powered by a remote PSU.

I've been developing a new tube reverb and it worked absolutely fine on the breadboard. Built it up as a pre-production unit and it was very noisy. In optimising the layout I'd introduced unwanted coupling that didn't exist in the original design. It took me days to get it right.

[Steve Conner]

Something like this.

[J M Fahey]

I have been thinking about building a bread board of sorts for test building tube amps. Has anyone done this or seen it done? I would love to hear your ideas and opinions.

Thanks

I started using them from the very beginning, 1969 or earlier ..... still do

I mean real breadboards: a piece of leftover chipboard , some nails, and brass wire for ground and rails, and soldered parts.

No place for plug-in breadboards in the high voltage Tube World .... besides the small detail that they weren't even invented way back then

I had to do it that way, because I was a poor student and all my Electronics parts used to live in one of my Grandpa's cigar box es, no kidding.
Then I upgraded to a wodden 3 wine bottles box, with a smoked acrylic cover.

The point is that I built whatever interested me, using parts full length leads (for later reuse), experimented at will and then tore it down to build something else.

I *have* used live, on stage, amps with a homemade chassis and a couple bolted down wooden breadboards inside, to test some idea under real world conditions.
It has been invaluable, and quickly sorted the chaff from the wheat, whatever actually works from what only *looks* good.

PS: Steve: I loved your bench picture

PS2: fwiw I *still* use wood and nails breadboards, currently I'm experimenting on a MosFet high voltage Piezo Reverb, direct drive.

[teletwanger48]

Very interesting.. great input from everyone. Giving me some ideas and solidifying many of mine. Should be simple to create a split amplifier doing this. Wanting to do a Champ/Princeton type power amp mounted in the base of the cabinet with a more sophisticated preamp that is mounted in the top of the cabinet. I have seen old amps that were done this way and I guess they ran the high DC voltage up the cabinet.

[Mick Bailey]

I like having a plug-in breadboard in my setup to use for transistor and IC stuff that I use alongside the high voltage side. This gets its own +/- 15v supply. The main work area is two lots of group panel strips - 18 pairs of solder tags each. I try to be organised to make it easier to replicate any design later on, but usually it ends up looking like ivy has grown over it. I solder leads and components to the tags, but only since I got a new desolder station. This makes Hoovering the solder off back to nice clean tags really quick and easy.

It's odd how often the random looking thatch of wires doesn't cleanly transpose to a neat and tidy build. Sometimes the mojo is in the chaos.