New Mexican Scrambled Eggs with Tortillas

We will be back to our amp-lee-far project shortly.  But first, we must cook.

Today we'll make New Mexican Scrambled Eggs with Tortillas.  This is very easy to make (you see that *I* am making it, so it can't be too hard), and you can cook up (heh heh) your own variations.

You see most of the ingredients in the picture, here's what we have:

For 2 portions

5 or 6 eggs (I usually use 5)
2 small corn tortillas, cut into wedges
1 small can green chilies (or fresh if you can get them)
2 to 4 tablespoons cilantro, chopped (fresh preferred, but dry will do in a pinch)
2 green onions, tops and bottoms, chopped
2 to 3 tablespoons cheese (use what you like)
1 small sausage such as chorizo or andouille (optional)
Olive oil - 2 to 3 tablespoons
Butter - (you may or may not need it, see text)

First, drain your chilies.  If you use canned, put them in a wire strainer and smash 'em down a few times to get as much liquid out as possible.  The liquid is ok in the dish, but your eggs will take on more of a green color if the chilies are not drained.  Your choice.

If you use fresh, you won't need to drain them.

Heat the olive oil in a large skillet over a medium-high heat.  I usually use enough to put a thin layer on the bottom and not too much more.  If you cook this a few times, you'll get a feel for how much oil you need.   I try to use enough so that some is left for cooking the eggs without sticking. 

When the oil is hot, put the tortilla wedges in and cook them briefly until they soften.  You don't want to cook them until they're crispy.  I find that about 30 to 45 seconds on the first side, then flipping them and cooking for maybe 20 seconds on the second side is about right. 

Move the tortillas to the sides of the pan and add the green onions, cilantro and chilies.  Saute them for a couple of minutes.  You don't want to overcook them - just get them a bit soft.

Add your sausage or other meat if you like.  The meat is totally optional - most of the time I make this dish without meat, but on this day I had some andouille so I threw it in.  Works either way - you be the big boss and adjust to suit!   Isn't cooking fun?

You should still have some oil on the bottom - enough for cooking the eggs.  If not, or if you're not sure, put a tablespoon or so of butter in the pan.  I usually add butter, but this time I was ok and did without it. 

Beat your eggs as for scrambling (duh), and add them to the pan.  Turn the heat to low.

I generally put a bit of seasoning - salt, pepper, chile molido, white pepper, cumin, hot sauce, etc., into the eggs before beating.  Use whatever you like.

Cook the eggs.  I try to be gentle with mine - I push them to the center so the uncooked parts run to the sides.  You don't need to stir too much at all.

After a few minutes, the eggs will begin to set and you can add the cheese.  Put in as little or as much as you like.  I use packaged "Four Cheese Mexican" for this - it's already shredded and it's convenient.  If Gordon Ramsey were coming to eat at my house, I would shred my own rather than endure his wrath, but he's not here, so there you have it!

Besides, this is too much like lowly peasant food for Chef Ramsey, so he probably wouldn't eat it.

What is this?  I'm making some hash browns in the pan next to the eggs.  Dig it!

When the eggs are done, serve them up.  Eat.  Enjoy!

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Tweed Pro Bandmaster Super Clone: Final Assembly, Pt. 1

Clip, clip, solder solder and we have a speaker lead.  I found a vintage 1/4" jack in one of my junk...er...parts bins.  Just the thing for a bit more vintage vibe.

The chassis and speaker installed in the cabinet.  Just need to connect the speaker, put in some tubes and fire it up.

I like to charge the capacitors slowly for the first start up.  I do the Gerald Weber method of 40 volts for 12 hours, then 10 volts per hour until it's up to full voltage.

On the right is my old Weston voltmeter that's connected to my variac.

This method seems to have its followers and its detractors.  I like it for a couple of reasons:  first, I can monitor the voltages and current draw in the amp as it comes up to full line voltage.  If there's a problem, I'll see it at a lower voltage and have a better chance of shutting it off before there is damage.

Second, this method slowly charges the filter caps instead of hitting them with full voltage.  While it is true that filter caps are rated for a specific voltage and it won't harm them to hit them all at once, they are a storage device, not unlike a battery.  This method isn't about being safe - it's about charging.  Charging them slowly helps extend their life.  Also, I've found that in amps with caps charged  this way seem to sound 'beefier' than amps I've just brought up right to full voltage.

The two arguments against this method that I hear are that the rectifier is not up to full voltage and therefore isn't producing B+ until the amp is running on about 70 AC line volts.  This is patently not true - in fact, this specific amp had about 56 volts on the B+ line with the AC set on 40 volts, and continued to go up from there.  Anyone who thinks there is no B+ until the line voltage is higher should try this method and see for themselves.  Even on such a low AC voltage and filament voltage, a rectifier tube will produce DC.

The second argument is that this is "hard on the filaments" since they are running at lower voltage.  This also is not correct.  The Radiotron Designer's Handbook (4th edition), as well as Electronic Communication (the 1959 edition) state that filament and tube life is lengthened if the filaments are run on lower voltage.  What is damaging is running filament voltage higher than the recommended value.

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Tweed Pro Bandmaster Super Clone: Installing the speaker

Here's the completed chassis on the workbench.  This picture gives an idea of the size of the transformers.

Now ve chust poot into zee cabinet and make loud sound!

And speaking (ha!) of loud sound, here's our Loud Sound Maker.  This is a Weber Classis series alnico speaker.  It's a 12 inch clone of the classic Jensens that were used in American tube amps in the 50s and 60s. 

I may have nentioned earlier that Fender never offered a 2 6L6 amp with a single 12" speaker.  There were models with 2, 3, or 4 10 inch speakers, a model with 2 12 inch speakers, and one with a single 15, but never a single 12.  So I am creating a new model!

The  Weber tag.  The 12 is for the size, and the "125" is the inch decimal size of the voice coil - in this case 1.25 inches.

I've had this since October of last year waiting to be installed.

The business end of the speaker.  This is a 'ribbed' coil - it will have cone breakup (distortion) at higher volume levels and tend to sound brighter than a smooth (unribbed) cone.  Weber sells all the variations - just get what you want.

For this amp, cleaner is better.  It will be used for jazz mainly.

Here's what I use to bolt the speaker into the cabinet:  an 11/32 box end wrench.

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Chassis Wiring is Complete on the 5F4, 5E5, 5E7 Tweed Clone!

All the wiring is finished.  I just double-checked everything against the layout diagram and it's ready to go!

I still have a couple of bits to tidy up after the amp is up and running.  I left the brown and blue leads from the output transformer primary intentionally long for now.  If they're reversed, the amp will oscillate (squeal).  I'm fairly confident they're correct, but if not, I have plenty of lead to work with.  The green arrow in the picture to the right shows the extra lead length.

I also left the leads to the 100pf bright cap long too.  In my experience, 100 picofarads is real bright - I tend to like more like 47 or 68.  If it's too bright, I'll change the cap to a lower value.  Rather than snip the leads short, I figure I can reuse the cap in another project as needed.

There are also some flying leads off the chassis I want to dress/tidy up after it's working as well.

Beauty shot of the backside (hee hee) of the amp.  Those transformers are works of art.

Yummy yummy.  These things are amazing.

There are bits of snipped component leads and wire that fell in the chassis, so I used some compressed air and my trusty Eureka Mighty Mite to clean it up.

Next up:  put the speaker in the cabinet, put the chassis in the cabinet, hook 'em up and bring it to life!

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Chassis and Input Wiring on the Tweed Bandmaster/Super/Pro Clone

There is a fair amount of wiring to be done.  Most of it involves taking each 'flying' lead, trimming it to length, dressing it, and the soldering it to the appropriate place (usually a tube pin).

Here's a typical small part of the process - I'm soldering a 100K resistor across the second preamp tube.  You can see a couple of other leads from the board already in place.

Snip, solder, snip, solder.  Whoo hoo.

You may recall that we're using shielded wire - RG-174 - for the input jacks to the first preamp grids, and for the long runs over to the volume pots.  The wires on the coax shields are pretty small, so I'm using a bit of heat shrink tubing to try and ensure they don't contact the core wire. 

Or something like that.

This is a closeup of what I did.  I learned one lesson with this stuff- heating them up too much when you connect them *will* melt the insulation between the core and shield.  Need to be careful and not do that, lest we have a short and defeat the purpose of using shielded wire.

The input jack ends of the coax.  The shields are pulled back - I'll connect them together, and then run a line to the preamp side ground.

I'm going to run the shields to an .01 uf capacitor, then to ground.  This will trap any RF that's on the cable shields on the instrument cable coming into the amp.

There are a lot of things I've put into this build in an effort to keep hum and noise to an absolute minimum.   I'm as anxious to hear (or not hear...) the results as I am to hear what the amp sounds like. 

Instead of leaving the pairs of 68K input resistors on the board, I've elected to mount them directly on the input tube grids.  Again, in an effort to reduce noise.

I twisted one end of each of the pairs together, and then attached the hot lead of the input cable to the other end.  Doing it this way eliminates a bit of what would be unshielded wire in a stock tweed amp.  There's about 4 inches of wire - it may not make much of a difference, but this is the highest gain part of the circuit, so we'll find out.

The twisted end of the resistor pair goes to one of the preamp tube grids.  The one in the picture is for the normal channel and goes to pin 2.

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Mounting the Circuit Board - Tweed 5E7 Clone

I give up.

Try as I might, I can't seem to solder directly to a chassis!

I wanted to solder the AC mains ground to the chassis near the point where the line enters the chassis.  Armed with a Weller 8200 soldering gun on the 140 watt setting, I was unable to melt solder on the chassis.  I let it heat up for about 6 minutes - and it was very hot to the touch, still no dice.

So I drilled a hole and mounted a ground lug for it.  It will function the same, but I did want to solder it.  I suppose I'm not using enough heat - I may experiment with using a gun and an iron both next time.  Maybe.

We can now drop the circuit board in and starting wiring it all up.  The first thing I need to do (before I forget), is put the bottom, insulating, board into place.

There are 2 holes in each board that I'll use for mounting. 

Before I can screw the board down (as opposed to screwing it up, I suppose...), I have to solder the main B+ lead, the bias lead, and the choke leads onto the board.  This has to be done now since I want them to come up from the bottom. 

In the picture on the left, I'm holding these leads before I trimmed and soldered them into place.

Here's the board in place.  Nice labels, huh?  What a mess.  The good news is it will go away soon.

I've seen other folks' build pictures on the interweb and quite a few people don't label the 'flying' leads that come off the board.  I couldn't work that way - I have to label them.  Too many leads, and too many of them originate from places other than the edge of the board, so it's not always obvious where they come from.

I mentioned there are only 2 screws to hold the board down.  Here's one of them.  I decided to go with black screws rather than silver (nickel).  I think it looks pretty cool. 

These kinds of details are why boutique amp builders (ahem) can charge so much money for their amps.

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Tube Filament Wiring, Completion

The filament wiring is now done.  Since the chassis is so narrow, it's hard to get good pictures of it, but this will give an idea.

The filament line just runs from the power transformer, to the pilot light bracket (left side in the photo), then across the chassis and to one of the output tube sockets. 

Then it goes to the other output tube and then the three preamp tubes.  Well, two preamp tubes and phase inverter, to be more accurate.

Another shot showing more of the whole run.  I tucked it against the chassis inside the little lip that is the bottom edge.

Thrilling, right?  Next time we'll have a lot more progress!

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Tube Filament Wiring, Part 1

While you weren't looking, I mounted the power transformer, choke and output transformer to the chassis.  It now weights a ton and since the PT is at one end, it's also unbalanced.  Not that any of that matters, but I just thought I'd throw it out there.

So, lookit all dem wires!  Geez, what the heck? 

It's actually not too bad - the reds are the B+ (high voltage) line, the yellow is the rectifier filament (5v) and the green is the filament line.  Ve chust poot dem to de right place, ja?  Hopefully.

I have to make a set of twisted pairs for the filament wiring.  So I just chuck them in my English 'egg-beater' drill on one end, and in a vise on the other.  Then I turn them and voila! you have a tightly twisted pair.

Coupla things.   This time I procured some solid core 20 gauge wiring to do this.  This stuff is real hard to turn, so I wound up using an electric drill rather than the hand one.  It went ok, I just used a real slow speed.

Second, I don't think I'll be using cloth-covered wiring for filaments anymore.  In twisting it, the outer cloth layer tore a tiny bit in a few places.  The inner (white) insulation is fine, but the little tears don't look great - if anyone would ever get six inches away from it and look.  So I think I'll use modern wire the next go-round.

On the other hand, it does look very cool, and of course, vintage-appropriate.  If you look at the bigger version of this image, you can see the fuzz on the cloth.

Why do we twist the filament wiring, you ask?  It's because the filament line is AC (6.3 volts in this case), and AC voltage will produce hum in the amp's output if it's close to signal wiring.  Early telephone and radio engineers figured out early on that twisting the filaments in this way concentrates the AC field around the wires.  If the filament line is kept away from signal wiring, it will be much less liable to introduce hum. 

The rectifier is wired up and I'll get the other wiring going too.  I need 2 days to bring the amp up on the variac, so I'm hoping to have it done by the weekend when I can fire it up.

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Tweed Pro/Bandmaster/Super Clone: Attaching Switches and Pots

The one part of amp building I get stuck on is wiring input jacks.  I can never remember which tab is for the switch, tip or the ring on these three-conductor jacks.  I always have to suss them out with a meter.

I also had a heckuva time on my last builds getting the one meg resistor that goes from the input (tip) to ground on these things installed. Mainly because I put the jacks on, then tried to put the resistor in. This time I wised up and put it in place before I put the jacks in the amp.  These are the jacks mounted, waiting for the final connections.

I've gotten into this habit of putting some actual vintage (aka old) component into each of my builds.  Maybe in an effort to put some mojo or vibe into each amp, but mainly because I have a bunch of this old junk laying around and I can put it to good (re)use.

For this amp, one such piece is the pilot light assembly.  I have a whole slew of pilot lights - some are this 'Fender style,' but I have some really crazy ones too.  I think on the next amp project (...and it's already being marinated in my brain...) I'll use something a bit non-standard.

Anyway, this is your typical pilot light assembly - maybe from the 60s?   I got in a bunch of old parts I bought off the ol you-know-where auction site.  This one's in really nice shape.  I just polished it up a bit with Mother's Mag Polish and it's ready to go.  This is the 'before' picture.

I figured I'd better put an actual bulb in it so I don't forget.  You may be surprised to find that I have a couple of small parts drawers full of incandescent bulbs for old radios, amps, etc.  This amp needs a #47 bulb. 

Here's the amp chassis with the input jacks, on/off and standby switches, pilot light, and pots attached. 

It's really starting to look like an actual amp-lee-far!

Next up is mounting the transformers, then putting the circuit board in and wiring it up!

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Front Panel Installation on the Tweed Amp Clone

I decided to relocate the fuse from its usual tweed amp location on the front panel to inside the amp.  I used a Littlefuse block and bolted it right near the power transformer's location.

It will become a little clearer as the build goes on as to why I did this, but the short version is: I wasn't going to put a ground switch on, and I figured I could put a label on that side of the panel.  I could use the room taken up by the fuse holder as well.  It's a bit less convenient, but let's face it: if the amp is blowing fuses, there's a problem that needs to be addressed.  You're going to wind up opening up the amp anyway.

I think I alluded to a 'solution' to the challenge of insulating the input jacks.  Here it is.  I had a front panel made up of engravable plastic.  It comes with a protective sheet on it, and I want to keep it on so I don't destroy it.

Since the panel is plastic, the outside nuts won't touch the chassis and ground them.  Problem solved.

I'll give more information blather on the panel when it's unveiled, but I think it's a good change from the standard chrome on tweed amps.   The chassis I have was actually just plain steel, not chrome, and it was picking up scratches if I looked at it wrong.  I was disappointed with the supplier, to be honest. 

The panel can be attached with double-sided tape.  I went to my local semi-independent hardware store (not the Despot) and found this heavy duty 3M tape.

You just attach the tape, then peel off the backing and then stick it on whatever you're sticking it on.

. 

Before I removed the backing, I cut out the holes for the pots and switches.  This will help when I line it up to mount it.

After I attached the panel to the chassis, I carefully pulled back a bit of the paper covering around each hole so there will be some room for the nuts on the pots and switches.  I'll pull off the whole sheet when everything is wired up.

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Mounting Tube Sockets, on the Tweed Amp clone

On the last few amp builds I've done, I've 'graduated' from using bolts and nuts to hold tube sockets on, to using pop rivets.

On the right we have my trusty Arrow pop-rivet gun.  It's probably not the best quality, but it gets the job done.

I'm using steel 1/4" rivets for the tube sockets.  If you haven't pop-riveted before, it's quite easy.  Easy enough that even I can do it.  You load the rivet into the gun...

...and you insert the rivet through the hole in your work piece.  If you look carefully you'll see I have a second rivet in the other socket hole to keep it aligned.

Then you squeeze the trigger.  The rivet starts to compress and you release the trigger so the gun slides all the way down on the rivet.  Then you pull it again and whoosh...click...you have a nice rivet.

Here's the finished rivet.  Looks pretty good.

You can see that I went for ceramic tube sockets.  I like the ceramic, and hopefully they will have a long life.

Here's the back side (actually it's the bottom...) of the chassis with the tube sockets mounted as well as the speaker output jacks.  The jacks are insulated with shoulder washers. 

In this shot, only one of the preamp tube covers is in place.  I'll use all three of them when the amp is finished.

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