Has anyone here built a flat board amp design center?

[mort]

Does anyone know of a surface mount 9 pin socket base? I've been looking around and can't find any.


I could put something together and have a terminal strip for each 9 pin tube for easy connecting, but I can't think of a way for the socket to be very sturdy while keeping it all pretty small and simple. Any ideas?

[Enzo]

In post #5 I offered this link:
http://www.tubesandmore.com/products/P-TB9-3-2

They have the same thing in one, two, or three tube arrangements. The socket pins are not wired, but if you don't want to wire up circuits right on those boards, you could easily run wires from each socket pin directly out to a turret. Then mount the little board on your plank. You might have to mount it up off the board a little, using standoff spacers, to clear the socket pins underneath. They won't be screw terminals, but...

[mort]

Thanks Enzo. Those are a little spendy for what I'm doing. I was hoping to find a $3 equivalent to the octal base. I'll probably just figure a bracket to mount a typical 9pin socket to, and then run wire leads to surface mounted terminal strips.

[Enzo]

There you go, solved your own problem. And we used fahnestock clips for everything 50 years ago, no reason they wouldn;t work now.


Octal bases are still used on the relays those sockets are made for. I am not aware of anything using the miniature tube base, so no products to mate with it.

[Zozobra]

A bit of a late reply to this but here is how I'm currently approaching this.

My first plan was to build an amp with a generic 2xKT88 power amp with 5 preamp sockets. This has taken me an embarrassingly long time partly through being busy, lazy and running into space problems trying to fit everything in and the damn PT getting lost and then stuck in customs for way too long. My plan now is to keep the power amp in the chassis I've made and then to farm the preamp out to a separate box. For this purpose I've just bought a 2U rack chassis and I've ordered a custom wound toroidal power transformer which will supply 6 preamp tubes up to 400VDC which I can drop to whatever I want by means of a dropping resistor or regulation (I'll see how this goes with just dropping for now). I've also included a 15VAC winding which I can regulate to 12VDC for powering relays if I want to add switching. I also have enough power spare in the PT to include a 5W PP poweramp too if I want to use it as a standalone amp but I may not bother.

For the actual preamp prototyping I have bought a large bag of screw mount turrets from ampmaker.com so I can mount and reuse at will. They weren't much more expensive than regular turrets and they mount with M2.5 hardware. I'm using 3mm PTFE for the board as I scored several sheets of it cheaply from ebay and it is very easy to work with, just score and snap it to size. Much easier to work than the phenolic and G10 . This approach has the advantage that I can test the intended layout too so I shouldn't run into too many nasty surprises and if I should cock something up horribly then at the very worst I will only toast the stuff in the rack and my expensive OT and PT are safe. The custom wound toiroid only cost £40 delivered! A further advantage is that the rack is quite portable and I can try it out with a multitude of different amps so long as they have a half decent FX loop to plug into. It should hopefully give my a nice modular and portable prototyping solution. As for the power amp its currently designed around a cathodyne PI that looks very similar to that found in the VHT D60. I may well add a second generic LTPI board since I now have the space. I'll no doubt post a thread somewhere on here once this all comes together.

[TNblueshawk]

Bump....I was learning too much

Mort where you at?

[Zozobra]

2U chassis has arrived. Just waiting on the PT and hardware now