What I admire about you is that you have way more patience then I do to take the time to type out complete posts with thoughtful facts.

As far as playing skill, it's all relative. I've been bumming a good bit lately. I just can't seem to get anything musically going recently. Yet, I have more than a couple musician friends who get a good bit of live playing done each week. They play cover tunes and Grateful Dead & Phish stuff. Which I have no problems with, and would be more than happy to play, but I just don't seem to fit in with their little groups they have. It's pretty depressing.

The BM shipped today, will be arriving this Friday!

Same here!

Gregg

I don't want to set off alarms, because it looks like a good build, but I see some non-dumblesque lead dress issues. How important it will be is hard to tell. Most importantly power it up and let us know how it sounds!!

From what I can tell it looks like it was built well. If you go and look at some pictures of real Dumbles http://www.roblivesey.com/dumble/ and the Ceriatone shots you'll notice that the leads are laying against the chassis for the most part. Especially lead dress for V1, V2 & V3. Also, the heater wires are up above the sockets instead of down against the chassis. All these things are very likely very debatable issues by many amp builders. But by some, they're considered a must have. Even Nik use to build them with the heaters down, but has changed to above.

After looking at Niks pics I can see the differnce now. Alot cleaner lead dressing on his.
As far as the heater wire, are you saying that Nik does the so called "fender" style heater wiring?
I think I may be more concerned with the lead dressing then anything.

This is my last night on at work so I can't wait to fire it up when I get home in the morning.

What issues might I run into with the lead dressing or heater wire like this?
Change in tone?
Noise?

Chris,
I'm sorry but I was referring to the way the heater wires and the lead dressings are right now.
You mentioned there's "non-Dumblesque" lead dress issues. What problems might occur because of these issues? Or is it more a cosmetic purist issue kind of thing.

BTW, I fired it up earlier and played for a little while.

I was playing a G&L Legacy with stock p'ups through a Avatar 2x12 with Eminence Red Fangs.

The internal trimmers are set at: 10 - 8 - 10

I started at 12 o'clock and went to 9 o'clock with the Treble, Mid, Bass
I adjusted back and forth with the Volume and Master
When I adjusted the Drive or Level, I could not tell ANY change in tone.

My first impressions:
1) very "middy"
2) Very tight
3) Extremely clean
4) NO OVERDRIVE

Ok, heaters? This is mostly a reduction in noise from the AC current that the filamants use. Electrically the thing to consider is this noise, besides being annoying can be degrading to the tone. It's more of a proximity thing. How close they are to sensitive signal carrying lines. It is an "opinion" thing for sure. There may be more reasons why Mr. Dumble preferred one over the other. Very likely just a less chance of messing up with them above. Also, from my understanding he started out mostly modding Fender circuits which were done this way and maybe he just never bothered to fix what wasn't broke.

Now when it comes to wires carrying signals to the tubes and back. Once again it's an issue of reducing all noise inducing issues. With wires floating up in the air like "antennas" it's a possible problem area. But also and what many refer to is you'll notice certain leads actually running in parallel and close together at points. Typically this will cause capacitive coupling which typically is not wanted, but this is what many feel was done purposefully by Mr. Dumble to sculpt the overdrive and other areas of tone. So overall it's believed that following the lead dress maticulously is very important in obtaining a perfect clone. YMMV.


Cool!

I'm a little confused what you're saying here....

Again...not sure what you mean by no overdrive