Express and Liverpool Kits

[HappyStrat]

I just saw that Ceriatone http://www.ceriatone.com/index.htm offers an Express & Liverpool kit which I think was just posted. Anybody have any experience with any of their kits, especially the quality of their parts?

[MooreCowbelle]

I don't have any personal experience with Nik's kits, but by all accounts on other boards (AX84, 18watt, etc) these kits are top notch.

[fzfwyv]

Nik is the man.

Great stuff and high-quality work!

Here's my Nik-spress!

[img:820:615]http://mywebpages.comcast.net/rszmagaj/t3.JPG[/img]

-Rich

[HappyStrat]

Wow.........that's a very nice build. Is your Nik-spress, his TW Express kit?

[keithrick]

Me personally, I think the goal of this site is to read, do your homework, source your parts and make your own amp. Buying a complete kit takes away half of the fun and you won't learn as much!

[sandman]

Me personally, I think the goal of this site is to read, do your homework, source your parts and make your own amp. Buying a complete kit takes away half of the fun and you won't learn as much!

Good point but another way to look at it is how I have chose to do my first wreck. I am buying a liverpool kit ready to go san's tubes.
Reason why is I have put togather a champ, and a deluxe, with luxe
having some issues at first.

With a turnkey pool, I can study the amp, do some tweek's and learn not just the circuit but educate myself on the finer point's of electronic's I bypassed, I will lessen frustrastion, and
hopefully when I build a ground up fracesca (sp) express i will be much better prepared. My newbie .2 cent's. VDG

[philmanatee]

If Nik's kits are anything like his chassis I'm sure youll be happy. I just ordered a Rocket chassis from him today. Everyone that has seen my express has been quite impressed with the chassis I got from Nik. Phil

[v00d00blues79]

Phil,

Did you have Nik make the Rocket chassis like the layout files? or did you have him change anything on it? i'm thinking ahead to my Rocket build...


Thanks,

Andy

[philmanatee]

I had him only make one hole for the power transformer wires to match mooses power transformer. Phil

[bucky]

Do these kits only come with a pre-assembled tag board? The wording on his site has me a little confused.

[chris_d]

Do these kits only come with a pre-assembled tag board? The wording on his site has me a little confused.

I think that all of the kits come with preassemled boards standard, but you can, i remember hearing, get in touch with Nik to get the bits only, unnassembled, as well. He is said to be very accomodating for that sort of thing.

-chris

[bentonar18]

One of the reasons folks use Nik is the quality of his boards: they are top-shelf! The soldering is first rate, and though his freight is high, you won't beat his workmanship. I've bought a board or two from him; I can't touch his soldering skills.

John

[Zippy]

The soldering is first rate...

Does the soldering look to have excess solder to anyone else? I see globs of solder on top of most every turret. That's not the way I was taught to solder milspec type applications.

Not to drag down his kits but I would not regard it as "first rate". Probably still a reasonable value if one removes the excess solder and reflows each of the joints.

[chris_d]

Does the soldering look to have excess solder to anyone else?

It is hard to tell for sure at the resolution of that photo, but it looks o.k. to me? The only places that it might look "globby" are on the turrets with a few(like 3+) of different components in them...?

I don't know. The kits get pretty good reviews, is all that i can say. And they are reasonably priced... And you can get them unassembled if you want.

For some folks it may be a good option.

-chris

[bentonar18]

Why would you need to reflow anything? Everyone of those "globby" solder joints is bright and shiny. He may use more solder than you, but I've never heard anyone say they had to reflow any of his work.