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peavey roadmaster super duper festival

Started by ilyaa, April 03, 2015, 02:38:34 AM

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DrGonz78

Roly I just have to say that last post was really really great!! Many great lessons passed along regarding documentation of repairs and how it can pay off down the road. Thanks for all the great posts you contribute too.  :dbtu:
"A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new." -Albert Einstein

Roly

Thanks for saying so, but it's always my pleasure Docilyaa seems to be making progress towards being a real amp tech and I'm more than happy to pass on what I can.  I'm retired now so I don't have any trainees any more, and I miss it.  When you have to explain something, say the vectors operating in an electric motor, you are forced to revise what you may not have touched for years and it not only refreshes your understanding it often expands it too.

Then the process of putting these concepts into words, metaphors if you can, helps you better understand the topic.  I love that "oh .. I get it!" moment when a trainee has grasped an idea, a concept, however imperfectly, but the basic understanding has arrived.  And I'm not losing anything because I always come away knowing a little bit more than I did.

I remember a wonderful dinner with a Physicist friend ripping into the Pi-Coupler (a coil and two variable capacitors that couple the output of a radio transmitter to an antenna), his mathematical view and my intuitive view, a cask of red, and a snowstorm of paper covered with drawings and math, and three hours later we both felt we had a better understanding of what these three components did, and how they did it.




A written job report is a bit like a good contract, the mere fact of it existing can avoid a lot of trouble.  Simple misunderstandings can sometimes turn sour and as an independent operator where good rep and satisfied clients are your advertising, you need everything going for you.

I learned to do job reports (and keep an "engineers diary"*) when I was working on industrial safety equipment, and later bio-med, and there was always a small but finite risk that one day I might have to defend my actions under oath in the witness box (where I have been, but not on my own case thank goodness).

{* this is a private bound book (not loose leaf) where you make observations in more detail than you would in the job sheet (like "the client is a real dick", "the machine is basically totally clapped out").  Each entry is dated and initialed and ruled off.  Things can be crossed out (but should still be readable) and no pages should ever be removed.  You can insure against busting the client's machine, but my private horror was somebody losing a finger, limb, or life because I made a mistake, and your Engineers Diary is your insurance against civil or criminal legal action.  Or it may drop you right in it if you are sloppy, but it's supposed to be a truthful and unvarnished account, and if you know what you are doing it will be a lifesaver.}

When I was doing a lot of PA it was common for a member of the support band(s) to come up to the desk and almost plead for "a good mix".  "Everybody gets the best mix possible at this desk".

Clients don't come in and say "please do a good repair", but they shouldn't need to.  All work on band gear is up a level of criticality to domestic repairs, an on-stage failure is rather more significant.  It's not at the level of avionics or bio-med where lives depend on equipment working properly, but for both yourself as a tech, and for your client, you should always try to work to the highest standards.  It is tempting to cut corners, say only doing a superficial post-repair test, but if you don't feel like it then goof off and watch TV, and do it properly tomorrow when you do feel like it.

When you find a "repair" where the driver transistors have been put in the wrong way (and not corrected before it was returned to the client "not going") then there is a "tech" who should just give up now and take up Macramé, because eventually the landscape will be dotted with his smoking wreckage, his reputation will be in tatters, and Macramé will be his only remaining option.   8|


If you say theory and practice don't agree you haven't applied enough theory.