This is my Crack that I finally completed tonight. The base has a couple coats of Rust-Oleum Chinese Red -- I'll probably add another coat -- and the top has Rust-Oleum Gray Hammered. The transformer bell cover has at least three coats of the red. I had to add a couple extra coats if hammered gray to "fix" a problem that resulted in much loss of the hammered effect. Spray paint lesson: start the spray off the intended surface to avoid an undesirable initial blast!
So far no parts upgrades but I did add a 6.3v pilot light. I hadn't soldered anything in years but though the result is not as nice as some of the jobs I've seen here my Crack did test within spec at the get-go! I'm listening to some Mumford & Sons as I type this and boy do I like this Crack so far.
The Speedball upgrade is next in line. If you are planning to add the Speedball and ordered it with the Crack kit, then I have a few suggestions:
So far no parts upgrades but I did add a 6.3v pilot light. I hadn't soldered anything in years but though the result is not as nice as some of the jobs I've seen here my Crack did test within spec at the get-go! I'm listening to some Mumford & Sons as I type this and boy do I like this Crack so far.
The Speedball upgrade is next in line. If you are planning to add the Speedball and ordered it with the Crack kit, then I have a few suggestions:
- This was brought up in the forum before: Build the Crack without the Speedball first to get an idea how the Crack sounds, and it should be easier to debug problems if the PC boards aren't in the way. I'm not going to add the Speedball for a while 'til after I get a good handle on the Crack. I've completed the boards, but they'll just sit around until then.
- Knowing that the stock output caps have to be bent down to accomodate the larger Speedball board, I soldered them already in a laying down fashion. This way I avoided any issues trying to bend them down later as there isn't a lot of real estate there. I actually soldered them angled away from tube socket B for additional clearance.
- Install all the nylon standoffs either at the start or definitely well before finishing. By doing this I was able to route in advance wires that might later be difficult to move out of the way, in particular those wires in and around tube socket A.
- Knowing the plate load resistors are to be removed later, don't overly bend the resistor leads so that they are easier to remove from the terminal strip.
- I don't know about you but the cathode resistors didn't really want to go between the two terminal strips very easily. So knowing also that they are to be removed later, I simply soldered the connected end resting on top of terminal 3 rather than through it. This definitely makes for easy removal later. The other ends I soldered to 7L and 9L as instructed since that is relatively easy to do and still be easy to remove.
