Youthful Indiscretions

Rick said:

In my younger days cruising electronics junk shops, I had something of a tendency for buying stupidly oversized capacitors (often salvaged from old equipment and dirt cheap) and dumping completely unsuitable amounts of power into them.
Think ~415VAC directly into something the size of a tea mug or coffee tin and rated maybe 25V and whole farads.
Very pleasing bangs (and clouds of what looked like fibreglass raining down).

It’s a wonder I’m still alive…

You and me both, Rick.

I wrote this on another forum, where I was hiding under a pseudonym, Penny Lane – it’s basically a recount of an episode in my own life, slightly altered to fit Penny’s fictional life & just because – but it’s pretty close to reality.

https://clive.semmens.org.uk/Fiction/Penny/Rocketry.html

(The book originated in posts I put on that forum, but grew a lot subsequently. A lot of the book is basically recounts of my own life, often but not always close to reality.)

a stereo pair of class B amplifiers with four EL34s

Class B? Really? AB1 or AB2 were more likely, I’d have thought.

You’d need a negative grid bias supply to achieve class B operation

Very possibly, Dave – I honestly don’t remember. It’s 57 years ago, and I’ve done no analogue electronic design work in over thirty years. Call it Push-Pull and be done with it!

I remember needing negative feedback to achieve anything like linearity, even after I’d got proper cores for the output transformers.

A couple of other youthful indiscretions – the first repeated several times without incident:

https://clive.semmens.org.uk/Recounts/PennyRail.html

https://clive.semmens.org.uk/Recounts/ThreeLessons.html