O'Connor plexi build?

[mike7]

Hi all
Has anyone ever built a plexi or any other amp from the Kevin O'Connor tonnes of tone books? I ask because I tried to build a simple tremolo pedal from one of his books and could never get it to work no matter how many times I tried! I have built many pedals and rarely ran into a problem I couldn't fix.
So as far as investing money in an amp build from his books just scared me. I like his ideas but I am unsure to say the least. His distributed filtering makes me wonder if the amp would even sound good or be to sterile. He has some ideas I would like to add to the 5f6a build I am slowly working on but again I am unsure. Can anyone shed some light on this subject for me?
Thank you all for sharing your experience and knowledge!! It means a lot to this beginner.
Mike

[LOUDthud]

Kevin's projects usually work, but sometimes they need a little tweek. I built the "Hood Amp" from Tonnes of Tone. The bias was too hot and there was no mention of how to tweek the bias. I found it elsewhere on the web. His power supply was a little weak, it needs a bigger transformer to run continously without a fan.

I think the Plexi was in TUT3. His layouts are hard to follow because they are really just sketches. You really need to do your own layout to scale with the parts you actually have. You can follow his general layout and expand or contract to make things fit your board and chassis. I like to use Engineer's Computation Pad (0.2 inch grid) to sketch the layout and locate where eyelets need to be. Kevin's layouts lean towards functionality, not aesthetics.

It's not hard to find an email address for Kevin and he does answer emails.

[mike7]

Thank you.
I will try to add some of his ideas. The one in particular is having a bias control for each tube and having 4 tubes to offer a different tone from a 2 tube amp and being able to switch from 4 to 2 tubes. That's just cool IMO....
Thanks again for your help!
Mike