Garage Rock or the making of the egg...

The first part of my project is now assembled and the testing and tweaking has started. It is incredible what soundlevels a 4x12 cabinet connected to a small 20 W amplifier can produce in a small garage. My ears are ringing slightly :) Have to be careful not to get tinnitus. The audio range is as expected and I really got the oomph I looked for in the bass region. Running up and down the lowest string on the SG-clone makes the sleeves of the shirt vibrate and all tools and stuff in the garage rattle. There are some extra noise and resonances from the backpanel of the box so I have to mount some bracing ribs on the inside to stiffen it up. Otherwise it is good and Lukas is amazed :)
I have not used any fancy stuff for the finnish, the outside of the box I covered with left-over glassfiber wall-paper we used in our house, glued it on and painted it black, the material on the front, protecting the speakers is burlap or jute fabric used in simple bags or coffee-sacks.
The logo: HAm with the arrow on the "m" (yes of course...) I added just for fun. Why "HAm"?
There are some reasons, my real name is Hans Åström and in this anglophile world we drop the "rings" and the "umlauts" so it becomes Hans Astrom. In the company where I work we use the intitial letter of the fist name and combine it with the initial and last letter of the last name = HAm when we approve drawings and documents etc.
The other reason is that I am a Radio Amateur holding an operators licence. An amateur radio operator is known as a "HAM" and that I am.
The arrow does not need any explanations in the Wholigan community but in my version it is modified to depict one of the common symbols for an antenna when drawing electronics schematics.
Now off to build the amplifier...

Edit April 25:
If somebody does not understand what Dale is talking about in her comment I show you this picture nicked from www.thewho.net:

I dont' want to see such holes in my speaker cabinet either :)

Another day in the woods

Yesterday was a crisp and clear day here, with a little frost in the morning, so my son Ian and I took off to the woods. Ingela and Lukas stayed at home recovering from a recurrent cold. It seems that we won't get rid of those colds this year.
The day started out bad. When driving the muddy road into the woods, I got stuck in the mud at the very place we always park our car, the frost in the soil is giving in to the sunshine and warm days and the road gets very muddy for months to come until mid June. So there we were, the car resting on its very bottom and we had to work for one half hour to get out of there. The whole car was covered with mud and so was Ian :) He reminded me of the boy in "I'm a boy" in some funny way. Then the saw-chain on one of the chainsaws suddenly flew off the chainbar. The oil channel had got jammed with sawdust and when there was not enough oil supported to the chain it got overheated and prolonged and jumped off the bar. Then the harness used to carry the brushsaw broke. Crap, crap, crappetycrap...
This small barn of logs you see in the picture is oh so typical for my home village. In my childhood they were everywhere in the landscape. Along the shores where people cut the grass from the shallow shores and stored in the small barns for the winter, in natural meadows in the middle of the woods and in small fields, worked up by draining bogs and cultivating it into fertile soil. This place in the picture was once a typical case of the latter. Drained and prepared in the middle of the 1930's by my grandfather and his sons.

Now it seems to be in the middle of the woods because these fields were reforrested by me in 1991. My mother stopped farming completely in the late 1960's after my father died in 1966. The fields were then used by her youngest brother until he called it a day in 1990. But it comes in handy as a storage for our stuff and as a lunch-break shelter.
In the second picture you can see what it is like nowadays. Spruce all over the place, interfoliated with birch. They grow fast in this cultivated soil.


Along our way into the woods we pass by a big anthill. One week ago there were no signs of activity there, but yesterday it was a hive of activity. Millions of ants working hard to repair the damages of last winter. The bright and warm sun had pushed them into action. The sun is warm during the days but still last night we had down to 8 degrees below the freezing point. Yesterday evening when we came home I tried to wash the mud off my car but the water started to freeze on the surface of the car. So spring has not really sprung, but it is close now :)

The winter strikes back and other backlashes

This week started out very rainy and suddenly on Tuesday evening the temperature suddenly dropped several degrees below the freezing point while the raining continued. On Wednesday morning the nature looked like in this photo I nicked from Ingelas' blog


In the evening snow started to fall and this morning when I went to job, our surroundings looked like this picture I have "borrowed" from a traffic information camera close to here


My audio-project ( my wallet to be more exact...) suffered a drawback recently when my intentions to roll my own audio output transformer went down the drain because I would have gone nuts having to wind several thousands of turns of very thin enameled copper wire by hand and having to keep a very exact account of each turn and were to locate them in order to not create unbalance, risk for short circuits etc. and there were no electrical machine repair-shop close by who would have done it for me to a decent cost.
But then I found this site on the web:
http://www.roehrenendstufen.de/
and Herr Ritter rolled a completely brand new transformer for me to my own specifications to a very decent price! All you audio enthusiasts in Europe, Herr Ritter is THE source for all kind of transformers and a lot of other stuff needed when building amplifiers.
Another little drawback is that I found out that my transmitter tube found in my junkbox will not deliver more than 60 - 70 W in audio operation with a decent level of distortion but that won't disturb me much :)
I could go into discussions of operating classes A, B, AB1 and AB2 here to tell you why, but I would go even more boring than usual...