Finally had some time to begin the build process. My wife is away at our daughters helping care for the new twins, and I am on duty for my wife's mother who lives nearby in assisted living. With nobody else to bother with the electronic mess, it's a good time to begin construction
Yesterday, I finished the inventory of parts and divided them into Amp and Controller groups.
I set up the assembly area on the kitchen table with anti-static mat, Panavice, bright light, Hakkon soldering station, and trusty magnifier headband.
Wow, the numbers on some of the parts are really small for old eyes, but at 10x, become clear enough to read.
I'm following along with
Don's excellent assembly advice/checklist and starting with the Amplifier assembly.
First the SMD op-amps. I found that a self-gripping tweezer with angled head worked best for me to hold the little buggers. What worked best for me was to:
Flux pen the mounting pads on the board
apply a bit of solder to the top-right pad
use the tweezer to position the SMD over the pads
heat the top-right one to melt the solder and hold the part in alignment
Solder the other pins
Resolder the original pin
inspect using the 10x lens to make sure all the joints were 'hot' and no bridging happened.
Took about 2 hrs to get the hang of that.. thank goodness that only 4 SMD op-amp packages were needed.
Then on to the diodes (done) and about half the resistors before bedtime. More work on it today.