While waiting for parts I went over every lead on the schematic and tested every part that I could and watched endless electronic videos and read more books.
Today the 100r 5 watt resistor arrived and I wired that in, as well as the bias switch replacement for the one I broke. I plugged it into the current limiter bulb and turned it on. The LED lit and the limiter did not. I took some volt readings and things looked good. I read 900 AC at the point where the rectifier diodes come together which is more than 630, but the instructions say 630 min, and that it is, so I assumed I was ok.
I put some tubes in, plugged it into an 8ohm bassbreaker cab with a v-type 70 watt speaker. Plugged in my guitar and then
ROCKED!
Glorious sounds came out! Pure joy, relief and happiness! That's a loud 5 watts!
Every control works great. The VRM works as it should. The bass and treble have excellent range and response over the full sweep. The tweed/tude modes sound excellent. The fat pull adds lots of bass. I'm guessing i'm going to be in tude and thin settings with things mostly cranked and using the volume on the guitar to clean up.
The v-type speaker is holding it back. I can hear its colour. It's too hi-fi and over powered for this amp. I haven't ran it paired with my AC15 yet, so I can't say for sure, but I'll probably throw a good old 25watt greenback in there to blur and warm up the extremes of the response a bit. I'll test it with the 16 ohm one in the vox.
Next step is to get a few tubes to play with - like el34. I've never been in love with JJ, too bright, and tend to use EH in my other amps. I'm undecided on building a box or ordering one from Trinity. I'm going to watch some youtube vids and see what I can pull of with limited tools and some pine planks I have laying around.
Everything is sunshine today
Thank you Mitch and Hank for helping me through this and thanks to Trinity for making this kit available. It was a great experience and will continue to be for many years. I'll record a few sound clips once I play with it some more and post them.
Good times!