Only been three days waiting for the bell cap's paint to dry....eleven more days to go lol. I quickly realized I'm not strong enough to cold turkey the Crackatwoa build process, I needed a little taste...
Good there were a lot of minor things to work on:
First, I worked out the wiring for the output caps. Since mine have radial leads, not the default axial, I needed to route one lead to the other side. I soldered an extra wire for each cap, covered the joints with heatshrink, then hot glued the wires where the velcro straps will be, so the joints won't get stressed. The caps are still to this day 91% off on Parts Connexion (
https://www.partsconnexion.com/ASC-81958.html), so only cost about $5 a piece—for that price, any quirks are worth dealing with. Also, 60uF is more than sufficient for my 600-ohm AKG K240 Sextetts.
Next, the Audio Note pots don't have a stopping pin (or orientation pin?), so the pots under the chassis could potentially rotate over time and perhaps ruin the wiring or solder joints. To make sure that isn't an issue, I fabricated side-mounted plates with stopping pins. I cut some hard plastic into shape (from a plastic container lid....it's really stiff) with my heavy-duty scissors and attached one to each pot with industrial-grade double-sided Gorilla Tape. It works very well!
Lastly, I got my solid aluminum control knobs in the mail today, but the selector switch's shaft is a little too thick for them, so I had to drill one knob's hole to make it ever-so-slightly wider. Worked out perfectly. I'll save the photos of the knobs on top for when the amp is complete hehe.
