22 January 2012

sound practices reading club /38

Another great little article for the practicing builder and this time it is about iron. We are reading Junk Box Chokes by Sherman Hubelhank, from sound practices issue 7. In just about a page of text, Sherman covers both what matters for a power supply choke and how to measure and graph this yourself.

teaser quote: ‘[…] unless the builder can identify the choke by manufacturer and part number, his only recourse is to go to a catalogue and buy a choke that will meet his requirements. However, by setting up a relatively simple circuit […] those “junk-box” chokes can be readily identified as to their electrical characteristics and, hence, can be salvaged.’

a gift from Joe Roberts, SP editor: from the sound practices CD, here is the original article.

my take
I have said it before: getting the iron (transformers, chokes) together for building tube designs is one of the biggest hurdles. That’s why I like the attitude of this article, which is: fully check out the stuff you can scrounge, in order to put it to proper use. I also like that Sherman goes a lot further than just getting the basic numbers (inductance, current, DCR); getting that graph gives real insight into how a piece of iron ticks. This is also a useful exercise on any store-bought piece of iron.

A couple of notes:
  • .32 Amps; that rheostat has a 100 Watt rating.
  • It says at the top of the second page that ‘f in a full-wave rectifier circuit is 120.’ In about 78% of countries (quick calculation using info from this page) the AC is 50Hz and f=100.
  • Quite a bit of talk is about a swinging choke. Not something that you hear that often in the context of the class A designs we build. It is more for designs with vastly changing current draw (class AB/B/C). I would say that predictable inductance under varying steady state conditions (biasing, design changes) is more important to us; that means the left halve of the curve in the article.

Now go and read the article, see you next week.

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