#scrap build

Recently my son has gotten more interested in music. A month or two ago, I helped him research and buy a small headphone amplifier for his desktop PC setup.

However, in addition to the amp, he wanted a vacuum tube preamp since he's seen the one I have for my PC (you can see part of it in the last pic) and wanted a similar configuration. :)

So I set about gathering some parts I had on hand to put one together for him. He selected the wood for the case from my stash, and the white aesthetic to match the rest of his PC setup. I used 2 6C4 tubes because I had them and they seemed like a fun choice for this.

Most of the work came in constructing the enclosure. I used my chop saw to cut pieces to length, then resawed them on my bandsaw so they were thinner. I then glued up the wooden box with some support blocks to increase the strength and give me somewhere to mount the metal plate that will hold the parts.

I'd recently scored a bunch of aluminum and steel sheet, so I used one of the aluminum plates to mount all the parts. The thicker plate was really nice to work and drill and allowed me to chamfor the holes so the wires won't scrape. Then I painted it up and mounted in the components.

This project involved a lot of 3D printing as well, all the transformer covers and the capacitor brackets were printed on my FlashForge 3. Boiled Linseed Oil was used on the wood for a natural finish, and the power light enclosure is an old glass bottle that I 3D printed a diffusion cap for.

Overall I'm really happy with this project, and so is my son who's been using it constantly over the Thanksgiving break. :)

Suffer from hoards of junk from your dungeon

Realize you despise each and every one of them

Stop, before you burn them with heck fire, and think

Can I use any of them as materials, and turn them into something less despicable?

Bonus points for combining more than one junk into new art

If yes, profit! You shall art and craft with free materials!

Here’s a random project...

I decided the other weekend that I had enough extra speakers lying around, that I could try and build a pair of desktop speakers.

Found a slab of walnut in my wood scraps, and a pine board and a poplar board.

Am using the walnut for the front, and the pine for the back... the poplar will be the sides. First cut the walnut piece in half on my tabletop band saw, then used my scroll saw to cut out circles (ish) for the mid-range speakers I’m going to use. Next I used my drill press and a hole saw to cut the holes for the tweeters.

Then I cut the pine board down to the right lengths for the backs of the speakers. I measured out the size of the crossovers, then drilled holes at the 4 corners of the rectangle and used my scroll saw to cut out the remaining material. I’m much better at straight lines than I am at circles... :)

Not pictured... I’m gluing up one of the speakers now... so the back is being fixed to the sides. The boards weren’t exactly straight... so I’m doing what I can with glue and clamps. We’ll see how these turn out, this is the first time I’ve built speaker cabinets, so... who knows how they’ll sound.

PIRATE HAT