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Well, believe it or not, I once tried to make an Echoplex-wannabe tape unit.
I saw a moldy humid box full of tape heads on sale for, say, $5 or so at a shop clearing their basement and couldn't resist.
Got a surplus German Papst motor , a rubber pressure wheel and kludged some tape guides out of acrylic ... which would have lasted a few hours only, there's a reason they are made out of polished chromed steel ..... and even those eventually wear out, I consider recording tape a very fine grained type of emery cloth.
It worked, sort of
BIG problem was getting the high frequency (think 35 to 100kHz) bias/erasing oscillator coil ... as in I never could get or make them, so used cheesy DC.
Nice as a science fair type experiment, but impossible to make commercially.
Oh well.
Now the reverb tanks, no big deal, only custom part I had to make was a small die to press ferrite powder into pencil lead sized *hollow* cylinders which then were cooked into real magnets at a local Factory ... when we still had an Industry, that is.
Today they import from China and of course can't take custom orders for less than half a Ton of anything, way back then they sold me 1 kg of the dust which I pressed into some 5000 tiny magnets or so and had cooked by them, ferrite powder gets to a very high temperature where each grain sticks to the one besides it and forms a solid ceramic block, impossible to do at home.
Now I'm making them for peanuts (think less $4 cost) out of Piezo ceramic disks and "toy springs" .
The point is not "saving $15/20" but that they are *NOT* available here as a raw part, there is no shop in Argentina where I can order one or 10 , period .
I can import them straight from Belton Korea, paying a very good price, what anybody else pays in bulk (think Fender/Marshall/Peavey/etc.), around $10/12 each for the cheapest ones , but we are talking orders around 500/1000 units per lot to make it worth it, I have to pay the same for shipping but worst is I have to pay high Customs tariff, a fixed fee to the licensed guy who gets them through Customs and go through a Ton of red tape.
Add waiting 30/60 days for the whole deal to get finished plus a box of stomach burn pills , and suddenly drilling a few Piezo disks, cutting 4 or 6 inch sections out of "toy spring" , cutting/bending a small aluminum tray and riveting a couple terminals suddenly becomes very attractive.
Can make 10 of them in an afternoon which are good for a couple Months, only use them in box PA powered mixers and the odd guy who really needs one, most just plug their guitar in some digital multi processor and feed the amp a ready made sound, including lots of different Reverbs, all synthetic of course.
Next time I make a batch I'll post some pictures and maybe a sound sample.
I saw a moldy humid box full of tape heads on sale for, say, $5 or so at a shop clearing their basement and couldn't resist.
Got a surplus German Papst motor , a rubber pressure wheel and kludged some tape guides out of acrylic ... which would have lasted a few hours only, there's a reason they are made out of polished chromed steel ..... and even those eventually wear out, I consider recording tape a very fine grained type of emery cloth.
It worked, sort of
BIG problem was getting the high frequency (think 35 to 100kHz) bias/erasing oscillator coil ... as in I never could get or make them, so used cheesy DC.
Nice as a science fair type experiment, but impossible to make commercially.
Oh well.
Now the reverb tanks, no big deal, only custom part I had to make was a small die to press ferrite powder into pencil lead sized *hollow* cylinders which then were cooked into real magnets at a local Factory ... when we still had an Industry, that is.
Today they import from China and of course can't take custom orders for less than half a Ton of anything, way back then they sold me 1 kg of the dust which I pressed into some 5000 tiny magnets or so and had cooked by them, ferrite powder gets to a very high temperature where each grain sticks to the one besides it and forms a solid ceramic block, impossible to do at home.
Now I'm making them for peanuts (think less $4 cost) out of Piezo ceramic disks and "toy springs" .
The point is not "saving $15/20" but that they are *NOT* available here as a raw part, there is no shop in Argentina where I can order one or 10 , period .
I can import them straight from Belton Korea, paying a very good price, what anybody else pays in bulk (think Fender/Marshall/Peavey/etc.), around $10/12 each for the cheapest ones , but we are talking orders around 500/1000 units per lot to make it worth it, I have to pay the same for shipping but worst is I have to pay high Customs tariff, a fixed fee to the licensed guy who gets them through Customs and go through a Ton of red tape.
Add waiting 30/60 days for the whole deal to get finished plus a box of stomach burn pills , and suddenly drilling a few Piezo disks, cutting 4 or 6 inch sections out of "toy spring" , cutting/bending a small aluminum tray and riveting a couple terminals suddenly becomes very attractive.
Can make 10 of them in an afternoon which are good for a couple Months, only use them in box PA powered mixers and the odd guy who really needs one, most just plug their guitar in some digital multi processor and feed the amp a ready made sound, including lots of different Reverbs, all synthetic of course.
Next time I make a batch I'll post some pictures and maybe a sound sample.
, no wonder nobody can get to yesteryear's Surf guitar levels.
... his Reverb is incredible !!!!!!
Ach. It's not so bad here for some stuff. I could still get custom ferrite products I'm sure. But it would be from a prototyping place and cost more than ten working units!!! So, same problem resulting for opposite reasons. The big difference is that you CAN afford to make pans and perpetuate a local product due to trade arrangements and I CAN'T afford to not buy the overseas product. I predict Argentina will maintain sovereignty long after the US is owned outright by it's creditors! Then all of us in the US will make reverb pans! Unfortunately we won't be paid enough to afford one at that point.
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