Signs of progress

Today I got tired of watching the Penguins lose. With Melissa gone and TV production on hiatus I have a lot of free time on my hands so I sat down to finally build a working version of a small solid state amp from a schematic in Make Magazine. The amp is centered around the LM386 chip readily and cheaply available at Radio Shack.

I built one of these about a year ago that worked to a limited degree. Looking back at that project I had mistakenly swapped the polarity on one of the caps causing unwanted yet interesting intermittent operation.

I thought that if I'm going to try and put together a more expensive project like the Fender Champ then I should probably practice soldering and schematic reading on a smaller project. Here are some pictures of the successful completion of the amp.

As you can see it's a pretty simple amp involving just a couple of components. The reason I failed at building it properly so many times can be chalked up to stupid mistakes. As an example on the working version, before it was working I thought I was finished and just about bashed my head through the wall when it didn't work. I then realized I had yet to solder the chip to voltage. Stupid.

Also forgive the soft focus of these pictures. My digital camera has no macro capabilities. Also, when not working I tend not to care too much about image quality as long as you can see the image well enough.

There aren't very many solder points thanks to the design of the PCB which has long connective rows. That made it a lot easier to tie everything to 'ground' which in this case is the negative terminal of the 9V power supply.



That's a shot of my 'workbench.' It's frustratingly small but gets the job done most of the time. Also note the rockin' Penguins rug adorning the floor.

My computer is woefully unable to record audio right now. When I fix that issue I will put up some audio from the amp.

This project was more about the 'making of'' than the final product, but the final product doesn't sound that bad at all. I could wire in a pot to control the gain if I really wanted to (which I don't). I was thinking that you could build another of these and couple them. You could get a bit more power out of the extra speakers, and you could have different gain settings for each amp. I've always liked mixing a bit of distorted in with any clean signal.

I've read online about people powering a 4x12 cab with this amp. I've got a cable wired to plug it into my 4x12, but my 4x12 is wired to be a 1x12 right now. I'm wanted a bit less volume when I play for my neighbors sake.

As a side note this amp was constructed while listening to the latest Big D and the Kids Table album 'Strictly Rude'