Finished my 73-75 Homebuilt system and figured I’d write a little bit about the experience. This is mostly about the pitfalls of the project for those of you considering it. Anyways, hope somebody finds this interesting.
If you’re used to building from kits like I was, this is a little daunting. Sourcing all the parts was a little bit of a bear since 1) the BOM is missing a few parts and 2) they don’t spell everything out like which power adapter you need or ways to house it.
It took many hours to build this, although I saw some bragging on a certain forum that you can ‘easily do this in a few sittings’. Eh, not so much when you’re sitting with a giant stack of parts, many of which have similar value numbers. I started this in January and went slowly. Originally I was going to go module by module, but that would have taken even longer, so worked my way through the bags that had the highest counts first. The BOM is missing a certain capacitor. Also, mouser messed up the count on diodes and another part, but they sent me the missing parts for free.
If you build it the recommended way, testing has to be done before panel mounting the banana jacks. This means using alligator clips, wires, jumper cables. I took my time with all of it, especially calibration, to make sure things worked the way they were described.
I put the 17" reverb tank into the hammond boat and had to cut into the outer lip a little to make it fit. Some people don’t put it in the case, which makes sense too since it can get super loud and noisy when you’re patching. Bought a lot of #10 screws of different lengths at home depot for the feet and reverb mounting, as well as attaching the 2 cases (2 screws on each side). Added a banana jack to the side to allow for connecting a format jumbler box I plan on diy’ing later (the adapter model has 3 mini-jack to banana converters tho). The panels themselves went on with self tapping 5mm screws, after I drilled a slightly smaller hole for those. Also, I put a rubber grommet around the holes inside that connects both cases to prevent the power cords from getting damaged.
In the future, it may be fun to add more feet on the bottom panel and a handle on top for travel OR add rack ears. I’ve drilled into aluminum before when building diy guitar pedals, so I had the titanium drill bit for that, but a lot of people may not be used to working with enclosures.
The best resources were the MW thread and the 73-75 FB group.
Would I do it again? Maybe? Not sure yet. I will say that this is probably the most affordable Serge system you can build (900-1000 with all the parts) and that eased the pain quite a bit. The process also taught me how to utilize my multimeter better. As a historical piece, I really appreciate going back to some of the roots that inspired Make Noise and Mannequins designs.
