Out here in the fields...

...or might be more specific to say "Out here in the woods..." because we are now spending some days clearing some few kilometers of service road leading deep into a piece of land I own out on the island of Björkö. My life isn't always about designing transformers for a living or building amps, HAM-radio gear, furniture for my wife and PC:s in my spare time.
If you own a piece of forest and you sell wood to the papermills or to a sawmill or you chop trees and use the logs to build a house, it is mandatory to get plants of spruce or pine and get the piece of land re-forested and that also involves the procedure of screening out excessive trees and trees toppled by storms on a regular schedule or at least once in a 10 to 15-year period.
A little piece of my forest is now ripe for harvesting and a lot of it has to be screened. The major part of the screening we are going to carry out ourselves and the trees are going to be logs for the fireplace but before we can go ahead with the project we have to re-open the service-road to be able to get there using a tractor.
It has not been used much since 1994 and there are now growing birches close to 10 cm. in diameter preventing us from getting into the woods.
The schools are out for winter holidays now in ww. 9 here in this region and the whole family is taking part in this effort. I am the one in the middle operating the brush-saw. Closest to the camera is my son Ian, behind him Lukas' girlfriend Jenna and far ahead of me you can see a glimpse of Lukas operating the chainsaw.
Ingela shot the picture and it is nicked from her blog :)

Who came first?

Haahaa..! I just found a way to relate the headline of my blog to another Pete Townshend product :)
The question "who came first?" is relevant to the project I told you about in my last blog. So here we go: who came first, the hen or the egg? Building a guitar amplifier without a speaker-cabinet is not really a bright idea... Well, the amplifier project is rolling on its own path, still looking for an affordable output transformer because my attempt to roll my own stalled. In the meantime it just hit me I will have to get a speaker cabinet as well. So which one is the hen and which is the egg? Both are needed but which one to build first? I went for the cabinet. 4 x 12" it is gonna be. I found those beauties in the picture in a webshop on eBay.de and the price was perfect. I ordered them at once. Bass-midrange speakers 40 to 7000 Hz at 100W RMS each. Fetch your earplugs folks...

Wire and Glass

Wire and Glass is something well known to the Wholigans as it actually is a part of the Whos' latest CD "Endless Wire" or to be more specific, the songs related to Townshends' story "The Boy Who Heard Music". Wire and Glass is also relevant to my picture of today. Old Guitar Heroes and Ham-Radio operators can immediately identify the stuff as "Thermionic Tubes" (or "Valves" in the UK) that were used in receivers, transmitters and amplifiers in the good old days of electronics. Tubes are litterally built of small metal sheets, wire and glass, hence the header of this blog.
Hold on a minute, these guys in the picture doesn't seem ancient or even used? No, this stuff is mostly brand new except for the big guy with two "horns" at the left who is a QQE 06/40, maybe some 30 years old but never used. The small guys are two 12AX7 and one 12AU7. The stuff in the background are sockets for the tubes.
So, what am i really going to do with this stuff? The experienced reader maybe has the answer already, Hans is going to build an amplifier. Yes that's true, a while ago my son Lukas asked me about tube amplifiers because his guitar-playing friends had brought this matter up to discussion. You know, there is a never ending discussion going on in the guitar-player community as well as in the Hi-Fi enthusiasts community about tube-sound v.s. transistor-sound.
Sparked off by that discussion I started to dig into my boxes of junk and found this old but never used twin-power tetrode for transmitter use but also OK as audio power amplifier with the same capacity as four pieces of EL34:s or 6L6:s, a good power transformer and some other hardware. The other tubes I bought from a web-shop. There are several factories producing new tubes nowadays in Russia, Slovakia and China to name a few. The tube aint' dead for sure.
One problem in this upcoming project is the output transformer to match the speakers to the power tube. One can find them in web-shops as well but they are scaringly expensive. So I went to the scrap-yard and dug into a container filled with small electrical motors and transformers of all sizes and found one with a core of suitable size for about 100W output power and the price was one (1) Euro.
This is now to be dismantled and rewound. Piece of cake... :)
Maybe we will be able to test "Tube-sound by Hans" before the next Christmas.