Before Boozhound Laboratories:

After Boozhound Laboratories:

The Sansui G-8000 is a pretty good example of the the golden age of big heavy Japanese transistor amps, but is showing its age in the form of poor connections throughout the signal path. Einstein said that "Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." - and that is what I am trying to do with this beast. I have repackaged the power amp parts into a new chassis and left the preamp, tone, tuner, phono stage, and original chassis on the shop floor. The Dalek G-8000 is born!

Why Dalek, you dare ask - well... even half-assed Doctor Who fans know the Daleks were basically R2D2's punk-rock backwoods cousins. And of course they were evil. This amp is definitely punk rock and anything with a tranformer that big and capacitors that have the evil haiku "nichicon - 6800uF 70WV - negative black" on them is clearly born of mad science. The Daleks were fond of saying in the most horrible and distorted humanoid voice "WE OBEY NO ONE! WE ARE THE SUPERIOUR BEINGS!"

This mound of spaghetti is the guts of the beast. Did I mention that it doesn't work? The power supply and protection circuitry were fatally linked, being on the same board, and so a simple power amp got a bit more complex than I would have preferred. The best turns on, but the protection mode LED flashes as normal (to preven turn-on thumping), but apparently the protection circuitry is not happy with something and it never drops into operation mode. I have the service manual, but it will take a while to sort this baby out.

Update: So I decided that I wanted the sansui to run my as yet to be built monster speakers along with my as yet to arrive bottlehead preamp. So I had our main man Bobcat take the sansui to some total badass class A amp guru in ABQ named Doc. Doc traced the problem to some jfet that we were able to find parts for, and some dual diode that we have not. So now the sansui sits under the watchful eye of Doc, awaiting Doc to reverse engineer the dual diode. I hope he can fix it soon.

[amm]

[Update: 02/10/02] So I got the sansui back from DOC, apparently there was a dead spot in the bias circuit and fixing it wasn't actually that hard, but Jsn and I didn't ground anything correctly, while Star Grounding is "The Shit" for HiFi today, it doesn't jive with that 1970's wa wa funkadelic transistor 2 wire plug design. After a few beers, some head scratching, a few grounds snipped, and relocated, we tried it out, and to our amazement, it works, well sort of. It only works through Jsn's portable CD player.

Since it sort of works, us houndz do our best to fix up the wiring mess and actually add a few things like speaker binding terminals, input jacks, and some terminal blocks to fix up the grounding nightmare. Yes indeed those are some IDEAL Rachet crimpers, if you ever use crimpers, I highly recommend Rachet Crimpers. The Extension cord is a BHL standard design.

-H- Put's those Machine shop skills to work drilling holes with the most prized tool in amm's arsenal, the 14Volt NiMh 1/2" Makita Cordless Drill(Metal Gear Case required, BHL Spec #5) Notice the MCM Gold plated speaker binding terminals, and of course, some motivation for BHL can be seen in the background

[Update: 02/12/02] Well, after much beer consumption, and work, I took the improved sansui over to Jsn's to test it out and make sure it still worked. Thankfully, it did, until, we fried it trying to clear up some wierd 1 watt hum. Needless to say, Jsn and I don't know nearly enough about 70's transistor amp design to be troubleshooting wierd amp behavior. That sansui experienced a small amount of glory this weekend, and is now dead again, it will get to go back to visit the DOC, accompanied by a 30 pack of his favorite beer, Coors Light. Stay Tuned...

[amm]