mike stehr

Ready to wire finally...

Went through the same situation...had the drivers but needed a network. There is reason they do that which escapes me. I have a friend with split type D's, so I cheated. I built a pair of CS500s myself, and Crites did sell some necessary parts like the autoformer and woofer inductor. In hindsight, I should have just saved my cash and bought the type D kit from Crites. I would have saved money in the long run, instead of buying bit by bit. If I were you I would have went the Solen route. It seemed they put a bit of time/research into the idea. And they do have a higher range of capacitors other than the common black taped metal polypropylenes. It may had cost a bit more of course. Take the networks you have, and swap out the 8.2uF capacitor for your polypropylene flavor of choice.

Back panel with mounted rocker switch. Plates for binding posts ready to drill...

Have all the parts ordered except for binding posts and a thermistor. I didn't like the idea of the having the input jacks on a back plate with AC outlets, then having the input jacks go through and over AC secondary and heater windings to get to the 12AU7 input tube. So I drilled the input jacks on the front of the chassis, as close to the 12AU7 socket as I could get.

Olson transformers made nice OPTs. They (it?) look to be universal...

Then dipped in wax. If carbon composition resistors are hydroscopic, then those resistors are fully saturated with wax.

PS transformer has been torn down, inspected for broken wires, with the endbells re-painted. The lamination stack was crooked from heat...I corrected that. DCR was checked, and then I went ahead and ran the PS unloaded for a couple hours. It sort of got warm... Voltages with 117VAC go in line with the Pilot schematic...I think it will be okay. Output transformer DCR numbers match between each other, and should be fine. Transformer hardware was replaced with stainless steel. Bought new sockets, with hardware (screws,nuts) being stainless steel. A CE replacement multi-capacitor of 40/40/40uF at 525vdc is on it's way. I've got the chassis gussied up a bit so far, the wood endcaps are Wenge. Mike

And that's that. No way am I going to deal with wax covered sockets with rotted pins, and rotten wiring. Whatever magic those parts had, (if any) faded away a long, long time ago. I'm hoping it's still in the output transformers...

Original wiring, with burnt screen resistor.

Picked this up a few weeks ago locally. I've been wanting a EL84/6BQ5 power amp for some time, and wanted to go the Dynakit ST-35 route. But due to shortage of parts, that may be some time from now... Seen the Pilot listed local, and started searching online for information about SA-232. Seems to be some praise, maybe dying off a bit over that last 6 years. I didn't want another console stereo 6BQ5 push-pull amplifier, but the output transformers looked to be decent size.

We used to drink Carling Black Label