Mesh

After an hour or so at the local coffee shop with a good friend, I went searching for the mesh net thingie at the local stores. I checked our classic hardware store after her advice, but they only had kitchen utilities and stuff. So I headed over to the cheap-o-store, but they didn't have anything meshy, and neither did the next three stores... But at last I found a nice dust bin made from just the mesh I was looking for. It was even black.

So, the circumferences measures out to approximately 86cm around the top, and apprx. 78cm around the bottom, and it's a little over 31cm tall. That means it lacks just 4cm on that lower edge to be used for both top and bottom cover. Of course I can just buy another dust bin and have an abundance of mesh for later, but I think I'll just use enough mesh for the top cover and a few pieces of the remainder for certain places on the bottom cover. Either way, I'm not completely satisfied with how the cabinet has come out so far, and I'm really aching to build a cabinet from scratch... That is however not of very high priority, and will probably just never happen, but I want to never the less. So... Next up should be to find some mean of cutting this mesh to shape, and preferrably knowing what sizes to cut it ;)

Also, yesterday, I tried out the delayed speaker connection circuit, using BC618 instead of the specified BC617. I fed it around 28VDC, which shouldn't be too far from the ~30VAC the circuit's going to get in normal operation. It works, so I'm just waiting for the pair of 47µF/63V capacitors and the six remaining BC560 transistors now. Then it's practically just a few details before I'm all set to actually power up my playmate.

Kind-of looking forward to do that.

I'm also not quite happy with the speaker connection terminals, as they seem to require either a maximum diameter of 3mm wire to fit through the hole in the screw connector, or some kind of odd spade connector. I should've gone for screw/banana connectors like the Aura Z8A mentioned in an earlier post.

...and the last update for tonight; Almost entirely done with the wiring. All that's left to do about the wiring is to connect the speaker terminals, add connectors to the input wiring to mate with the input connector pins on the PCB (to the left on the picture, one is hidden behind the purple capacitor), a bit of 30VAC from toroids to power PCBs, re-mounting the input phono connectors, and solder the power switch back on. But before that happens, I have to replace the BD139/140 pair on at least the left channel, mount a couple of small heat sinks to the replacement transistors, cut the tray to allow for air flow over the main heat sinks, and of course get hold of the missing BC560s and 47µF/63V electrolytic capacitors, plus mount the 5 transistors to each of the main heat sinks.