Sockets and Capacitors

Added the tube sockets and capacitors tonight, most of them. I'm using the inverted assembly method in order to mount the board to a chassis and have only the tubes show through. Resistors don't matter because they are so small, but this impacted a few things in my component attachment today.

For the sockets, there are three octal and one noval socket. The instructions on the Tubelab website show how you can elevate the mini noval socket so it might be flush with the others when the board is mounted to the underside of the chassis cover. So I did this, using a small stack of Pokemon cards to get the right height to allow the connectors to just barely show through the surface of the board when I soldered it on. Even so, my noval socket is so much smaller than the octals though that I question if it will still be high enough. We'll see.

For the capacitors, I mounted them to the bottom of the board, and needed to ensure the correct polarity for the electrolytic ones. These have a stripe or other indicator to show which is positive and negative. Seems to have been pretty easy. The one mistake I made was that I ordered two of the capacitors rated at 85 degrees celcius, and the instructions recommend 105 to better handle heat of operation. I might replace these later, but thought it would be ok to proceed and hopefully this is just a matter of reduced capacitor life, not risk of explosion or other such deadly matters.

I do not yet have the coupling capacitors. I was going to order some nice Auricaps, but these were about $12 each, and I'm thinking I just want to get some sound out of this thing without spending a fortune, so I bought some cheaper ones and waiting for delivery. I also ordered my transformers today and that set me back around $140 including shipping for all three. I can replace the coupling caps later if desired to improve the sound.