I’m thinking of making a custom aluminium case for the Heresy amp.
Mainly want to change place of the volume pot and headphone jack. Anyone had experience with this? As “easy” as desolder and solder them back in with wires?
If done a lot of computer modding. But removing things from a pcb is new to me.
Any experience or any do’s and dont’s?
Rigid components with lots of legs, aren’t the easiest thing to desolder.
You’ll want a good iron, suction pump and solder wick, and you’ll have to be careful not to over heat the tracks and damage anything.
You also need to ensure everything is grounded to the case, there isn’t a lot of voltage in there, but schiit uses AC adapters and rectifies in the box, so if you don’t ground it there is a good chance you’ll end up with ground noise.
You’d probably need a new panel mounted headphone jack.
If you damage the pot it’s not an off the shelf part Schiit has them custom made by Alps, so you’d brick the amp unless you could find a replacement. If the box is bigger you might be able to fit a 24mm one.
It’ not terribly difficult to do, but you need to pay attention to the details.
You may also have issues if you desolder the pot, part of the rigidity is the mounting to the board, and there is a good chance the nut that mounts it to the panel could work lose with use.
Judging from what you just written, considering how little soldering experience I have… I think I’ll have to skip this.
Or try to find someone with skills that can solder it for me.
Thanks for the info!
I learned how to solder from watching this guy… he does really good close up shots… and he seems pretty good at it. I’ve recapped old PVM/CRTs and soldered tiny modchips using the stuff i learned from watching his channel. You might fail the first couple times… but buy a couple practice kits on amazon… stuff like simple build it yourself alarm clocks… etc… and you can learn the skills in no time, IMO.
Desoldering components from PCBs? – Yes
Building cases? – Yes
Modding the Heresy? – No
Yes. “Easy” on desoldering is kind of 7/10 on the difficulty scale.
To make this easy, you might want to spend a few bucks on “desoldering needles”. The stainless steel does not take solder making it easy to remove the leg.
Thanks for the links and info. Might just get another amp to test this on first (for like 30usd). Desolder and then solder it in place again.
Could also get some DIY kit and practice on that:
I agree with this, through hole components where you can apply tension to a single leg are relatively easy, but rigid components with multiple pins can be a pain because you have to get all the solder off before you can move it and the solder enters the PCB holes.
I’ve not tried needles, I always end up using a pump, and solder wick, and I positively HATE doing it.
you could practice on a cheap little headphone amp kit 15 and 12$:
Awesome stuff everyone! I’ll get a kit for sure!
