David McGown wrote:
Grover,
Glad you found someone who could design the Williamson front end board for you. I have to admit I have been a bit overwhelmed as of late with all my current projects and my Dad's health and care issues. My first attempt at doing an integrated solid state/tube design in KiCad ended up with the tube socket on the wrong side. I wanted to have the tube on the back side of the board so as inverted, the tube would be pointing up thru the top of the chassis, and the components, including the CCS and its heatsink pointing down into the chassis. Of course overconfidence led me to order 20 boards that will not work as intended (they still will work for other projects where the tube and CCS is fully enclosed, like a phono preamp). So learned a bit the hard way and glad I did not do so on a Williamson board.
One thing I can suggest if not too late is perhaps considering using 600V DC Link capacitors for power supply caps, or barring that, 600V KEMET electrolytics. The latter are a bit larger in diameter (35mm) but have an extremely long life (>15000 hours). The only problem with the latter are they may be larger in value than used in a classic Williamson PS circuit. It is nice to have really large value high reliability 600V electrolytic capacitors available, for a reasonable price.
Looking forward to Dave Gilliespie's postings on AK on W5 with the Heyboers.
David
David, sorry to hear about your Dad! It takes a lot of energy, for sure. Hope things go well for him. The board designer is Florick Wieber, who goes by "v4lve lover" on diyaudio. He's quite experienced and made a lot of very good suggestions. The cap slots are designed for Epcos/TKD 600vdc/47uF snap-ins. One could always use films and just off-board them, or anything else for that matter. I left the first cap off to allow for various rectifier choices and their cap-input requirements.