Beginner wishes to build tube amp


Hello all, 

I am searching for a winter project and thought "what about building my own tube amp"?

Any and all suggestions on kits, difficulty, what to avoid etc.. is welcome. 

 

Thank you,

Doug

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Many years ago I built a pair of Bottlehead Paramour 2A3 SET tube mono amps. The build was very easy, instructions were good, and the builder's forum was helpful. I spent extra time on them, making them cosmetically attractive. They turned out great and I was even able to re-sell them here when I changed directions.

I built three Elekit amps.  They are perfect for the first timer because the instructions and layout is super.  Not to mention, Elekit products sound great.  

You can definitely take 1-2 hours of YouTube lessons on soldering and board stuffing and be fluent for this purpose.  

As noted above, be careful with amp-speaker matching.  Elekit (for the most) part are lower wattage designs. I think they may have a bigger Push Pull now. Viktor is the North American distributor for them. He's in Vancouver BC and responds to forum posts and emails.  He's super.  

I just finished building my first tube project - a pair of monoblock 300B SET amps. They turned out great. I'm still burning them in and don't have them hooked up to my main system yet, but they sound very nice in my hobby room system. I created a build thread on the Steve Hoffman forum. Here's a link. 

300B Monoblock build thread