Super Tidy Offboard Wiring - pros and cons.

[Rixen]

not a pedal, but shows the idea.

[steveyraff]

Cornish does great stuff. He sent me a funny cease and desist letter once.

How does any body find out if their name/brand is being used? Does he have a search-bot scanning the interwebs for instances of "Cornish"?

I am glad you brought this up. I'd also advertised it on a classified section of a gear forum of some kind. Between it, and my eBay listing, I got numerous private messages from supposed fanboys saying things like "Does Pete know you are doing this?!". When I'd go to their profile or page, they'd have a lot of pictures of their pedalboards and their collection of Cornish pedals they were obviously very proud of. Again, this happened numerous times from different individuals. The forum was the worst because it started an argument amongst Cornish owners who were trying to say no one could make a clone as good as an original.

Anyway, I could only assume at least one individual ran to Pete and told on me lol. 

Either that, or as you say, he is searching eBay for his own products - but he is a busy man running a small company, so I doubted that. I also got one once from Zvex - but that was more understandable.

[ElectricDruid]

I tend to minimize the need for offboard wiring by layout.

+1 agree with this. Avoid the need for internal wiring by design as far as possible. Not only is it slow and error-prone to do, it's also the biggest point of failure - wires breaking off the board/jack/switches somewhere.

T.

[amptramp]

Here is the true exemplar of neat wiring:



and this is the associated schematic for the Acme Four-Tube Reflex Receiver:



A lot of radio's from the 1920's were made like this.

[davent]

This amp goes by the name of the Beast, sixteen power tubes and it's not mine by any means. A hobbyist's build, blows my mind...

http://sharksphotos.yolasite.com/







dave

[Perrow]

I tend to minimize the need for offboard wiring by layout.

+1 agree with this. Avoid the need for internal wiring by design as far as possible. Not only is it slow and error-prone to do, it's also the biggest point of failure - wires breaking off the board/jack/switches somewhere.

T.

Yes, slow and error prone.

I forgot to say, the led is also board mounted. Center of board just below the switch wires in the picture (you just see the legs as two dots), right below it is the led resistor. I hate mounting leds off board, sadly discovered this after I bought a 50 pack of led bezels.

ps. That reflex build looks like someone thought the schematic was the layout.

[italianguy63]

Here is the true exemplar of neat wiring:



and this is the associated schematic for the Acme Four-Tube Reflex Receiver:



A lot of radio's from the 1920's were made like this.

I think I see a "copper wire thingy" from a burst box to the right of the tubes. 

MC

[287m]

Seriously, watch this thread, i feel like A power chord man only and you guys are effortless shredder with full soul 
So amazing example.
===
and as always, the question 
what best solid wire like in Davent and amptramp post?
 

[marcelomd]

This amp goes by the name of the Beast, sixteen power tubes and it's not mine by any means. A hobbyist's build, blows my mind...

http://sharksphotos.yolasite.com/




...

Hah, looks like an overhead view of an industrial plant thing, like a refinery.

[kaycee]

I aspire to it, but rarely achieve it. Using solid core wire helps, mechanical strength of fixing and routing take precedent. A fetish for hot glue doesn't help either....

Planning the board and enclosure fittings is the biggest help. Having said that I will often wire up board mounted pots to change the layout of the enclosure, there's no helping some people you know

[davent]

Seriously, watch this thread, i feel like A power chord man only and you guys are effortless shredder with full soul 
So amazing example.
===
and as always, the question 
what best solid wire like in Davent and amptramp post?

All i could find in the write up was, "The thick twisted blue wire is Neotech 0.8 solid core which is what I used when I ran out of Bruce's supplied 0.8 solid core."

dave

[vigilante397]

I want it so bad I think I might puke.

[davent]

I want it so bad I think I might puke.

That's a mono-block, there's a twin.



dave

[marcelomd]

Hi,
The guy who built this monster said he was following a project from Bruce. Do any of you guys have any info about the original project? Who is Bruce? hehehe
Thanks!

[yanng45]

I aspired to do it at first but i never had the patience to achieve that level of extra tidiness OP was mentioning, mostly because i'm extremely lazy and offboard wiring has to be one of the most boring thing to do ever in my opinion. It's annoying when you have a completed board, you know it works, but you have to go through that wiring phase. Bleh.
So i went completely the other way and now board mount everything, you have to be extra precise with your drilling to line up the components perfectly so you avoid excessive "tension" on the pots and the jacks when everything's tightened up.

It doesn't have the "boutique" look for sure but it works for me :

[davent]

Hi,
The guy who built this monster said he was following a project from Bruce. Do any of you guys have any info about the original project? Who is Bruce? hehehe
Thanks!

Bruce Rozenblit is an anti snake oil guru in the hifi world. Has a kit company called Transcendent Sound and also published a few books with his designs so you can scratch build those contained in them. I've built his Grounded Grid Preamp from the book Audio Reality, maybe a dozen or more years ago, still functioning and sounding great like new. (It's also available as a kit.)

'The Beast" kit with tubes is not cheap and looks nothing like the one pictured, totally function over form, zero for cosmetics.

Can't begin to imagine how much money was poured into making them pretty.

http://www.transcendentsound.com/Transcendent_Sound_BEAST_OTL_Tube_Amp.html

dave

[thermionix]

Ha.  If you want the tubes included it's an additional $1800.  No thanks!

I can't bring myself to spend real money on music reproduction.  I'd much rather buy a guitar or build an amp or something.

[wavley]

Like in a Hiwatt the neat dressing facilitates the crossing of wires at right angles to reduce the possibility of coupling and oscillation.  I can tell you from quite a bit of experience, a Hiwatt is a lot easier to repair than, say, a late 70s Fender with it's spaghetti wiring.  Also, Hiwatts don't need all of the extra things to stop oscillations of poor lead dress that adversely effect tone, again silverface Fender I'm looking at you.  Not that silverface Fenders are bad at all, one of my main amps for years is a silver vibrolux reverb that I modded to brown specs for the verb channel and blonde twin for the normal, but every now and then I go in and chew off a little more of dressing the wires better.

When I build an amp, I aspire to Hiwatt build quality, yes I build less amps that way, but I can charge more for them, folks want the super neat custom amp on turrets thing.  Plus, it's a lot easier for me to diagnose and repair if I need to.

For pedals, I try to be neat and minimize as much off board as possible without sacrificing quality.  They're neat as I can reasonably make them without wasting time, using bonded wire that's easy to dress helps a lot, I usually get mine from Smallbear.

I build cryogenic microwave amps under a microscope for my day job and one thing I can definitely tell you is that meticulous attention to detail (to a point, sometimes it really more about aesthetics, I don't really bother too much with that, you have to know which things are important to worry about) heads off a lot of time troubleshooting when something doesn't work.

[marcelomd]

Hi,
The guy who built this monster said he was following a project from Bruce. Do any of you guys have any info about the original project? Who is Bruce? hehehe
Thanks!

Bruce Rozenblit is an anti snake oil guru in the hifi world. Has a kit company called Transcendent Sound and also published a few books with his designs so you can scratch build those contained in them. I've built his Grounded Grid Preamp from the book Audio Reality, maybe a dozen or more years ago, still functioning and sounding great like new. (It's also available as a kit.)

'The Beast" kit with tubes is not cheap and looks nothing like the one pictured, totally function over form, zero for cosmetics.

Can't begin to imagine how much money was poured into making them pretty.

http://www.transcendentsound.com/Transcendent_Sound_BEAST_OTL_Tube_Amp.html

dave

Oooh niiice. Thanks!

[amptramp]

I have seen rectangular wire used in two very disparate places: My Freshman Masterpiece radio from 1925 and the Hermes spacecraft.  The Freshman was the first mass-produced radio and it was made from 1924 to 1926.



The Hermes spacecraft used NASA NHB5300.4 quality standards and one of the standards was for the use of cuts and jumpers on printed circuit boards.  The jumper wires were flat rectangular section that would fit on a gullwing package with a lead width of 0.014 to 0.025 inch width and it could not extend beyond the edge of the lead.