What are some of your memorable build blunders?

[R ski]

Since the 90's I started tinkering with tube amps (old Hi-Fi amps) then built an assortment of 15 watts to 50 watts mostly resembling Marshal configurations. Here's a list of build blunders I encountered:

First marshal build, started with some rack salvaged from work, mounted tranny and tube sockets and went from power amp with a single pre amp ... then eventually added cascade stage then tone stack. Did point to point with no plan, found placement got difficult, ended up with a mess of components strewn, lot debugging to get working.

Next build was a 50 watt head, this time I done a lot of planing, that build was neater, but humm kind of lingered.

Decided to rebuild again, oh look at those copper box staples, they would make great soldering nodes, this build became worse then the original, scrap ... 0 : ( turned out the staples were copper coated, the metal was just plated...duh !!!

Found an article on star grounding, tried a large copper wire to act as a ground bus ... even worse ... taken that out and ran ground points per tube with isolated socket ... finally quiet .... ( ; I was happy

[tedmich]

Blunders eh? I'll recount one of my earliest: Soldering all the components of my Craig Anderton PAiA Quadrafuzz onto the wrong side of the board. It was OK for the resistors but a problem for a lot of the other parts...especially the 4 DIP14 ICs...

[big_teee]

I drilled a blank chassis backwards.
I looked at the drawing wrong, the layout was upside down, the chassis wasn't!
Live and learn.
Show me a guy who never F'd Up, and I'll show you a guy who never did anything! :<)
T

[Dave H]

I'm almost too ashamed to post this It's not an amp build but it is monumentally stupid.

I once had some of those axial thermal fuses (the sort of things you find embedded inside transformer windings). I thought they were too exposed with mains voltage on them so I decided to insulate them with heat-shrink tubing. I was wondering why they all measured open circuit and thinking I had a bad batch until it finally dawned on me, thermal fuse + heat gun = DOH!

[gui_tarzan]

Back in the 70s when I was a teenager I built a color organ to go along with my stereo. It worked great until it tipped over and fell into my stereo which didn't have a cover. Instant spark show and a small fire. Yes, that was stupid.