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The aim of this project was to build a simple, cheap guitar amplifier. I wanted to build an amp for around $200 without having to spend months designing it. Given these constraints i still wanted to build an amp that would shake the walls, oh and have atleast one or more tubes. Just for fun.

First was a trip to the local electronics store to see what i could get. Ended up coming out with a couple of kits and a heatsink.

Power Supply

The power supply is a simple kit from Jaycar – Power Supply Kit to suit SC-480. What i liked about this was that not only did it have +/- 40V rails for the power amp, it also has +/- 15V for powering a preamp. Perfect.

The only downside to this supply was the massive transformer it needs – 56V CT 134VA TRANSFORMER – 2.4A CENTRE TAPPED

Power Amp

The power amp i went for was the – SC-480 50W Amplifier

It just so hapened that the power supply was specifically designed for this amp. Bonus. The amp specs state that this is a 50W amp into 8ohms, but 70W into 4ohms which is how i will be running it, i think 70W is more than enough to shake the walls. I decided on a solid state power amp for ease of building and the fact that it was cheap.

The amp has low distortion and a good frequency range. Although all this means nothing to a guitar amp, so the desired sound will hopefully come from a well designed pre amp.

Again, the only downside i could see was that it needed a massive heatsink – Black Heatsink – DIECAST

Assembly

This is as far as i have come with the amp so far. Been thinking about cabinet and speaker design aswel as pre amp design. But for the time being i am assembling these two kits and researching the rest. More details will be posted soon.