Quote:
Originally Posted by SgtE
Whoa,, what tools are you using? I thought that maybe a soldering tool would be enough
anyway, a grand, are you serious?
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My soldering station features all pure silver wiring throughout. All caps are BlackGate and OrangeDrop.
(Just kidding- hang around here and you will understand my humor).
I was somewhat facetious about the grand, but I suspect that if people here added up all their tools, supplies, shipping and parts sitting in their bins, $1K is not a huge figure. You can spend $10 on an iron or $90 and up (and up) for a soldering station. You can spend $7 for a set of precision screwdrivers, or $40. You can spend $30 each for pliars, nippers, etc., or $6 each. That is why it is so hard to say "it costs this much to get into this hobby".
If you read Tangent's "Getting Started in DIY" page, he goes through all the tools, from cheap to expensive and tries to explain why you might want to spend more than the minimum. It is a good read. Also, his new training videos offers a lot of insight on the tool issues. He does his videos with a $10 iron just to show that you don't need a $100 station to solder, even SMD chips and resistors.
I'm just trying to say that, in principle, you can build a Cmoy for about $30 but no one has yet actually done that
Figure $100 minimum for tools and supplies if you don't have anything. If you manage to have anything left over, take your significant other out to dinner.
You also have the issue of minimum orders, freight and handling charges, etc. You can get almost everything you need to build a Cmoy from Radio Shack. You will pay at least double what you would pay from Digikey and Mouser. But once you start ordering from Digikey and Mouser, it is $6 minimum freight to order a part. If you order exactly what you need and nothing else, you will break something or order a wrong part, and then you have another $6 freight bill for a $1 part, and only from Mouser, who has no minimum order. So you start stocking up on parts and buying extras. Then you read about neat tools and parts here. Then you start buying boutique parts like high end capacitors and Rhodium plated jacks. Then you decide to build your own interconnect because $50 for a nice interconnect is highway robbery. After ordering $200 in plugs, cables, techflex and heatshrink, just to get enough stuff together to figure out what you want to actually do, you realize how cheap that $50 commercial intercoonect is. Once you are stocked up on interconnect parts, the next cable costs $20 and it is a nice cable that compares with the $50 commercial cable. But now you want that really neat chrome techflex and hey... people are talking about that pure silver wire so you are back on the treadmill.
Hmmmm.... see where I am going?
But... if you have DESCIPLINE, you can build that Cmoy for $30 (if you already have basic soldering tools) and call it a day. And you will be the first one to ever do it.....
) and after a couple of glimpses here I think I want to build myself a GOOD SOUNDING small portable amp that'll run on batteries (maybe also connectable to a dc, or is this hard?). It must be able to drive headphones up to 350 ohm.
