I'll pull out your heart you filthy bastard!

This is what I get for watching Venture Brothers before typing. :)

Ok, it's not a bastard, and it's not it's heart but the power supply. For the next stage of the rebuild I've pulled the power supply completely out of the case. This will let me get to all the parts, and test it without risking the rest of the unit.

I plan the following upgrades:

• Replace all cement resistors with Mills Wire-wound low inductance 5 watts. This is a significant wattage upgrade as well.
  
• Replace every electrolytic cap. If the voltage required is 50 or less, use Panasonic FM, otherwise FC. Bypass critical caps under the board.
  
• Replace carbon open frame trim pots with either ceramic or conductive plastic closed frame both of which are quieter and more stable. The conductive plastic pots are better, but lower wattage. I'll have to investigate why one of the originals got cooked before I can commit to them.
  

This is also a board which could benefit from an upgrade, but I don't think there's enough interest out there. It would be significantly more expensive than the output boads which I don't think I'll sell enough of the prototypes, let alone any production runs. But, if I can use this blog to fantasize a little, I would:

• Size the footprints for Panasonic FM caps, Mills 12 Watt power resistors
  
• Use double sided, 2.5 oz. silver plated boards
  
• Improve the tuner's cooling by:
  
• Using much better, taller heat sinks closer in design to what I used in the PV-Erik. The downside of these is that their footprint is huge by comparison, which is another reason why the double sided baord and smaller parts elswhere will be important.
  
• Add more vent holes directly under the heat sink fins
• Add TO-220 heat sinks to a few of the smaller transistors. This will make warm up a little longer, but greatly improve reliability. They will probably never fail due to heat stress again.
  
• For each 1,000uF cap I would use two 500uF-600uF caps to get lower inductance while keeping the same or slightly higher storage
• Add metal film bypass caps on all the critical electrolytics.
  
• Use the best modern ultra-fast recovery diodes for the bridge rectifiers.
  
• Improve the traces by:
• More than doubling the copper weight
• Thicker, better traces.
  
• Huge power and ground planes
  

If I could get enough orders, I would probably be serious about it, but the bare board would probably run around $400, so for now, I will just start replacing parts as I take a break from school. Maybe by Christmas I'll actually be listening to NPR. Or sending the 3001 to a tuner expert who can get the RF portions tuned up. Or I'll start replacing all the other electrolytics in the system. More likely I'll be trying to catch up because I was soldering instead of studying. :)

I'll post more if I get another digital camera, or after I have done the PS uprgrade.

Take care!