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Building a Trinity 18 Watt 'Plexi' Kit
The first thing I did was solder together the 'flying leads' to the bottom of the board. Even if you do not have the best soldering skills in the world make sure you understand a few principals. There is an art to creating a perfect joint or for our purposes a stable joint will not crack through the life of your amp. Think about the years of abuse this amp is likely to withstand as you create these solder joints. Know that a good joint is created only at a certain temperature and a perfect bond with underlying metal only happens when the joint is allowed to cool without any movement of the components for several seconds. In between perfection there is a lot of room for making parts stick together by lumping solder on them, but slack work will lead to noise, poor tone, unreliability and all sorts of weirdness.
Next came the top of the board. I ever so slowly worked left to right being very careful not to make any mistakes.
After putting the board aside the heater wiring was the first thing I soldered inside the amp chassis. Heater wiring should be done first, after assembling the tube sockets. Heater wires must be twisted tightly. This twisting must be done properly. Never take shortcuts with this. This was my first build. By the end of it, my soldering and wiring skills were well honed but at this point, there is some slop that I wish were not present. Here you can see the insulation is cut back too far and that is not the greatest joint in world; it did not get hot enough.
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Next came the power section. Note the area of chassis scraped for securing the ground to surface free of oxidation or any solvent. For the most part 20 ga wire is used however some of leads from the power transformer used 18 ga wire. Snippets from these leads were used at other areas of the power section where needed. For instance at the power switch and the earth ground (shown below).
Here is the main switch wiring. Note the dedicated earth ground for the amp. This needs to be a heavy and secure ground as it will protect you and the amp from any incoming unwanted voltage surge. You want a curve to the ground line and not a short straight length as this may short out if surged. Anything that does not pass down this line in enough time will pass onto you. Notice the wire to the fuse holder is pushed up against the chassis wall. This keeps it out of the way and in general running wires along the chassis takes advantage of the shielding properties of the aluminum.
Here is the top of the transformer wiring and power and standbye switches. Again, wires are run up against the chassis wall whenever possible. Note the flying yellow wire to the power switch which is from the AC mains section. I wanted to run this wire along the chassis twisted with the wire that connects to the power lamp but I did not have the length needed. This is an example of one thing I would correct on my next build. You can also see where I tied off two of the unused transformer leads and put blue shrink wrap on their ends. On my next build this is also something I would change by simply terminating these unused connections to the tag board that the heater wires originate from next to the transformer.
