are the insides coated also? Anybody have any photos of these new chassis?

Hi all,

Firstly let me introduce myself. I have just received my OTS 50 kit which will be my 3rd amp build. The 1st was a champ clone, and the 2nd was an Ceriatone Expression with some tweaked components. I'm really looking forward to building the OTS.

I can confirm that the chassis is powder coated on the inside and out, and is white in colour. It looks great! Also Nik told me that they switched to steel from aluminium for more strength.

See attached a couple of pics. The chassis already has some studs for grounding, but Nik told me to scrape away the powder coat in a few locations to ensure a good ground connection. These were (snippets from Nik):

The hole for volume pot
The hole for bright switch
The hole for treble pot
The hole for the DIN socket
For the 1st preamp tube, it'd be good if you burr the screw holes too (I've still got to do this)

He suggested that it might be a good idea doing all of the pot holes, but in the end I just took the simplistic approach and deburred any holes where the controls had something metallic that the user could touch such as pots and switches.

You will see from the pictures that I got a bit excited with the dremel , and Nik said you only really need to deburr a little bit.

Hope this helps.

Rick

Hmm, they look nice, but the one thing I was wondering was if the the areas that need exposed were pre-scraped clean. I guess it doesn't look like the powdercoat is too thick and is easy enough to sand down with a dremel or similar. The fact that they're steel is a good thing I suppose.

The only thing is you don't want to rely on accidently making continuity. Also, just getting a multi-meter to beep doesn't mean you have as good a ground as possible. You want a very secure, solid connection. As far as most pots, and non-power switches signal degradation is all that's at risk, but for power chassis grounds and other higher voltate grounds you don't want to question continuity. It could be a shocking answer.  

Seriously, even signal degradation will piss you off it becomes an issue. All it will take is vibration working loose a pot or switch, etc. to reduce the ground and start noise and hum, intermodulation, etc. I'm speaking from experience. 

Hmm my OTS kit just came in. I'll let you guys know of how it comes out of the box.