Fifty Thousand Watts of Power...

Okay, well maybe nothing so grandiose, but Sammy Hagar sure does belt that out, dud'nee?  Makes  you kind of giddy.  That's a lot of Les Paul in your face...

So I mentioned I'm a music geek and an electronics nerd, or vice versa... so here's where it really overlaps.  I love tube amps.  I've got a few amplifier projects I'd like to do in the future, and I will definitely document them here.

For now, here's a peek at some of what I've got laying around...

Oh, hey, did I mention I enjoy photography?

This is this great Musicman 2x12 combo amp I've got here.  Its rated at 120 watts, and those are 250 watt EV speakers in the cabinet.  They're HUGE and weigh a TON.  Its very loud, and has a great sound.  It has a tremolo circuit that isn't working right, I suspect a tube is out, and I've just been too lazy to get around to fixing it.  I live in an apartment and its not exactly convenient to fire up a beast like this.  The neighbors don't exactly appreciate it.

I took these pictures on my Nikon D200...

This is my super, super, super sweet Marshall JCM 800 2203.  A hundred watts of bone crushing, skin-shredding sonic force.  Those are 6550 tubes in the power section, which are actually technically bass amp tubes.  When I bought this amp on the cheap it didn't work.  I soldered back together the tube heater circuit and modded the bias circuit on the power section to accomodate higher power bass amp style tubes.  They don't distort as much as EL34s of 6L6es, and when I run my guitar rig in to the low gain input I can crank the preamp volume up all the way and it stays clean until the amp is so loud it feels like its going to cave in your skull.  I usually run an Electro-Harmonix "Metal Muff" pedal for my distortion, but if I use the high-gain input on the preamp the amp itself will get pretty gritty... it will also get uncontrollably loud VERY fast, and once again is the kind of beast that doesn't get woken up very often in apartment life.

without any lighting or equipment.  I like the colors it captures.

This is the hulk of an unfinished amplifier project.  I really haven't had the money to buy the remaining parts.  All of the internal components are complete, though the mainboard won't be installed in this chassis until the transformers are purchased and mounted.  I've modeled this amp's architecture after my Marshall 2203, but once the final components are on the chassis I'll be putting it on the bench and testing some ideas I have and experiment with some things to see how I can get a unique and appealing sound from it.

Of course eventually I'd like to offer this as a series of custom amplifier.  When I get around to setting up my custom amp circuit bench I'll do an article on it.  Until there's money for them though, these projects are pretty much shelved.

One Point Twenty-One...

I'll admit, I can be kind of a geek.  Or a nerd.  Or whatever.  There are a few things in particular I'm kind of geeky about, but two that really stand out are music and electronics.

So this blog may contain some of both, though mostly I'm going to be documenting some of the various projects I'll be doing involving fabricating my own parts and building or modifying electronic circuits and devices.  I will probably cover a pretty broad range of things, as a lot of different kinds of projects appeal to me.

The name of the blog was obviously inspired by the Back to the Future movies...  I mean, what greater modder of the twentieth century is there than Doctor Emmet Brown?  Dude hacked a DeLorean in to a time machine.  So for the heck of it, I'm going to blather on briefly about just how much power exactly one point twenty-one gigawatts actually is.  (This might be indicative of the kind of blog posts I may indulge in occasionally)

Power expenditure or consumption is measured in watts.  We hear about "volts" and "amps," but watts are a measurement based on both... basically, volts times amps equals watts.

Yeah, this guy.

So what is a watt, in practical terms?  Well, a 60-watt light bulb takes about 60 of them to produce light.  A 37 inch flat panel LCD TV requires about 120 while its on, and so on and so forth.

Next you need to understand the gradiations used in measurement of electrical concepts.  A watt is one watt.  A kilowatt is a thousand watts.  A megawatt is a million watts.  So every time we step up a gradiation, we're increasing by multiples of a thousand.  That means a gigawatt is - that's right - one BILLION watts.

So, if it takes 1.21 gigawatts of electrical energy to power the flux capacitor for a single time jump... that's the same amount of power required to run ten million televisions!  That's assuming all the TVs are that size, some might be larger, some might be smaller, but its a darn good guess.  I'm willing to bet if time travel is possible, it requires a whole lot more power than that, though.  Ten million is a whole lot of televisions, but its still not that significant in a more time-space bending sort of sense.

I'll mention also that creating unique, custom things of all sorts is something I do well and I do accept comission work on occasion.  ;-)

"Yeah Doc, but why a DeLorean?"

So, stay tuned in and I'll share of my hare-brained ideas, modifications, creations and general electronic tomfoolery with you.  Hang on, its going to be a geeky ride.