[Dean Roddey]

So I just completed my first step down the DIY path, which I'm kind of taking with a vengence here lately. I guess it started with my big fridge sized iso cab. I managed not to kill myself, though I did injure myself a few times.

So I decided then to sell off all my store bought hardware and go DIY on the electronics side. Everything is sold now, and I've got lots of parts ordered. I'm waiting on the transformers from Sowter to start my LA-2A build. I've got everything else. In the meantime, I'm working on my Seventh Circle Audio stuff. I got the API and Neve pre-amps, and the DI board.

I just finished the DI board and tested it out and it works fine. It was a couple evenings of work, but a lot f that was just feeling my way along. The others will go more quickly since I know what I'm doing now.

It's quite a feeling of accomplishment. Or at the very least it's a feeling of Non-Failurement. I guess I have some Norwegian bachelor farmer stock in my and hate to brag on myself.

For anyone thinking of doing it but a little scared to step up, it's not that hard. Particularly the Seventh Circle stuff. It all comes as a kit so you don't have to order parts. And it has good instructions. You do need to have a little soldering skill and some rudamentery understanding of electronics, but nothing that you could get with a week of watching Youtube videos for an hour or two a night. I'd done nothing more complex before than a Bitmo Trio mod on an Epi Valve Jr. which isn't very complex at all.

If you've never soldered any before you definitely need to practice. Soldering on a PCB board isn't hard but you need to get the flow down. You wouldn't want to have this be your first soldering experiment. But you can buy some blank PCB board and some connector wire and stick it through like a component and practice on that until you get it down. Basically just touch the tip of the iron to the component lead and the pad on the board, give it a couple seconds to heat up, then touch the solder right there where it is touching the lead. Just a little drop. It'll wick right down into the hole and make a perfect little fill.

Since I'd done a little soldering I just started with the real thing. My first four or five were not great at all but serviceable. The next ten or so got better as I went. By the end of the DI board I was doing them like a pro. So it's not a terribly hard skill to master.

The next step up for me is the LA-2A. The design is from Drip Electronics. It's a little more in-depth than the SCA stuff, since you have to order your own parts, but he provides a list with links to the actual web site pages for each part. You can buy nice pre-fab cases if you don't want to make your own. The instructions are very well done, so they won't be hard to follow if you have some basic skills.

I'm going to start on the LA-2A after the two SCA pre-amps. That'll be really nice to get that guy going. And the money saved is huge. A store bought one of course is $3K. I'm going to have about $800 in this one, and had I been a little more hip I could have gotten that down a bit as well, more like $725 perhaps.

Drip also has some other nice projects, the Telefunken V72 pre, the REDD 47 pre, and now the 175b vari-mu compressor. I definitely will take on some of those as well when I can afford it. But after the LA-2A comes an 1176. This one will be the hardest for me, since it has the least amount of hand holding. There is a parts list. But there's no really nice step by step set of instructions. So I'm saving it for last, after I've gotten my confidence up.

But it's also a huge cost saver. It's not expensive at all, costing probably no more than $500 if you aren'tgoing to buy a fancy case. I'm going to put it into one side of a case and later add another for a stereo one.

Some of it won't look pretty, since I'm opting out of buying the nice pre-fab cases in order to save bucks. But it'll be good where it counts, and you can always get the nice case if you want. And I could also move it to a nicer case later if I want.

Anyway, I'm rambling. But this is quite an exciting adventure, and quite a money saving one as well. I was always an electronics geek as a kid but drifted away from it towards the software side of things. So it's kind of fun to get back in a bit. And to get some killer gear isn't so bad either. I figure if I had to store buy just these few bits I'm building in this first round it would cost about $8K or so. And I'm spending about $2.4K. And of course some of that cost is one time stuff to pick up some tools that I needed, which will serve me in various other projects moving forward.