I finished my Reduction today. Thanks, PB for the reassurances on the resistance checks. I'm loving the sound!
I took the chassis plate, transformer bell, shield mounts, and shields to a local motorcycle repair place to get powder coated. I went with a candy orange chassis plate and a glossy white on the other parts. I think they did an excellent job for the most part. There's some mild warping on the plate, and there are some chipped edges.
I've learned a few things that I think are worth passing along:
- Powder coating worked really well, but I maybe oversold the necessity for the back to be completely bare. This resulted in some lightly covered edges and led to some chipping.
- If you do go the powder coat route, make sure you have small files to clean out areas where the hardware mounts. I broke a couple clips off the power switch forcing it in, and you really need to press it in to get the switch to fully click. I think five minutes of filing would have fixed this, and I took a lot more care on the tube sockets.
- Although it didn't matter in the end, you'll want to make sure you clean some areas up around the screws on the power transformer bell otherwise you'll have some incorrect resistance measurements.
- On my first run at the stack of capacitors in the RIAA circuit (at least I think that's where they were) I was a little sloppy with the placement of the leads, which made it difficult to solder without melting a capacitor. I took a lot more time on the second grouping and I think it's maybe some of my best building yet.
So far I haven't needed to use the shields. I'm going to let this burn in and ride for a while before I install the Integration upgrade.
Jameson O'Guinn
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Main System: Schiit Bifrost MB, Rega Planar 6 with Exact cartridge, Eros 2, BeePre, Kaiju/Stereomour II, Jagers, Mainline
Desktop System: Crack with Speedball
