I stopped by there today. Nice! I spotted some Ge Diodes (1n34a, 1n270, others) and admired the impeccably organized ICs and passives. Some interesting salvaged parts too. Certainly not as cheap as online, but they're stocked well enough to provision many BOMs that we deal with. The dude was friendl...

You're right, older VCRs have more usable parts than the one in your photos. Mine was VHS, probably 1980s vintage. It was a forest of caps, with some useful trimmers and potentially useful transistors, etc. There were a few TO-220 regulators on special 3-wire tethers with sockets in the ends. And a ...

Wow, thanks, great info! I've been past there many times and had no idea there was a place like that. I live in Oly but work in Tacoma so its a pretty easy trip. Plus, I can zip over there while the wife is at Ikea

Sorry, but in Express PCB you can fab FOUR 21 square inches boards with the same specs + silk screen @ U$D 166 + shipping (less than 2,5 bucks for square inch at the end and 2-3 bussiness days for production) ... should be better prices out there, but I find it a good deal. True, and if you need fo...

Schematics done in ExpressPCB look a whole lot better than those from Eagle, just in terms of basic visual appeal. They communicate the circuit better. But from the standpoint of sharing a circuit and especially opening it to contribution from the community, ExpressPCB is a dead end. You can provide...

Sorry to necro this thread! I'm starting a Murder One, and am thinking I want to have the power supply on a separate board, in order to have more freedom WRT space in the enclosure, and to more easily sort out potential bugs. I figure I'll connect the ground from the speaker jack to a point close to...

FWIW, older VCRs often have some usable lengths of shielded wire.

Agreed totally. How does the Superfly compare to the Murder One in terms of gain and "tube warmth?" I'm not intent on clean sparkly headroom, more interested on getting a range from rock to metal, with a healthy minimum of fuzz/distortion pedals in front.

I found Douglas Self's Small Signal Audio Design to be helpful in understanding that stuff a little better. It's mostly about quiet preamp design, but he address mic preamps specifically in reasonable detail. The book has a whole set of circuits that look pretty easy to assemble, though I haven't go...

I've often wondered: how important is the AC transformer to the overall design? Would it lose anything by replacing the transformer section with an external bipolar supply like the MAX1044 based circuits? What about a buffered virtual ground, like with a TLE2426?

In for 20 at least. Are these for plain shafts, or in any case might they work on clear knurled shaft pots like this:

http://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Alp ... sSbA%3d%3d

Those have a handy hole in which to mount an LED

I'm reading the paper copy right now--highly recommended. It's a bit like Reed Ghazala's Circuit Bending book in that it's more about the have-fun-make-noise-shorting-stuff-out aesthetic than about electronics theory. It avoids using op amps, for example. It's a lot less rambling and incoherent than...

I was thinking about getting one of these. The company says they're metal film, but I am not convinced. Can you please check if they are actually metal film? You can check by heating one. If the resistance stays the same when heated, it is metal film. If it drops, it is carbon film. Mike I don't ha...

FWIW: I got a big resistor variety pack from yallstore: https://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=120582470602 They're marked for 1%, but they measure across 5-10%, depending on the values I randomly tested. For example, only a few of the 10ohm weren't 11 or above. One value is actuall...