So, I bumped into the name John Goodwin Nebraska the other day. Just popped up while I was digging around online for something completely different, you know how that goes. Can’t even remember what I was looking for originally. But that name stuck in my head for a bit.
It wasn’t like I found anything amazing about a John Goodwin in Nebraska. Honestly, it was kind of a dead end. Just a name. But it got me thinking about this old project I tackled a while back. It felt kinda the same – chasing down something obscure.
That Old Amplifier Saga
Okay, so I had this ancient stereo amplifier. Thing looked cool, proper vintage vibe. But it sounded terrible. One channel was fuzzy, the other kept cutting out. I figured, hey, I can fix this. How hard can it be, right?
First thing, I opened it up. Took pictures, lots of pictures, ’cause I knew I’d forget where everything went. Dust everywhere. Looked inside, trying to spot anything obviously wrong. Burnt bits, leaky capacitors, you know the drill. Found a couple of suspect capacitors, bulging a bit.
Step one: Get parts. Seemed easy enough. I wrote down the values on the capacitors. Went online to order new ones. Simple. Or so I thought.
- Got the new capacitors.
- Heated up my soldering iron.
- Carefully removed the old ones.
- Soldered in the new ones, making sure the polarity was right. Very important.
Plugged it in, powered it up slowly using a dim bulb tester I rigged up. Just a safety thing I do with old gear. No smoke, that was good. Tried playing some music. Okay, the fuzzy channel was clearer! Big win, felt pretty good about that.
But the other channel? Still cutting out. Randomly. Sometimes it worked for an hour, sometimes just a few seconds. Argh. This was the real problem.
The Deep Dive
So, back inside I went. Started poking around with my multimeter. Checked voltages based on a schematic I found online. But here’s the thing – the schematic wasn’t exactly for my model. Close, but not quite. Some parts were different. That’s always fun.
I spent hours, literally hours, tracing circuits. Followed the signal path from the input jacks towards the speakers. Used an audio probe I built – basically a capacitor hooked up to a small speaker – to listen where the signal was dropping out. It seemed to be somewhere in the preamp section.
Found some dodgy-looking solder joints. Reflowed them. Cleaned all the switches and potentiometers with contact cleaner. That stuff works wonders sometimes. Put it back together. Tested again.
Still cutting out. Man, was I getting frustrated. I started swapping components I thought might be the issue, like transistors in the problematic channel. Ordered some replacements, waited for them to arrive. Soldered them in.
No dice. Still the same intermittent problem. That’s the worst kind, the random ones.
At this point, I almost gave up. Packed it away for a few weeks. Just couldn’t look at it. You know that feeling? When you’ve thrown everything you know at it and it just laughs at you?
Eventually, I dragged it out again. Decided to check everything one more time. This time, I noticed a tiny crack on the circuit board itself. Barely visible. Near one of the connectors. I scraped away the green solder mask around the crack and carefully soldered a small jumper wire across the broken trace.
Put it all back together. Again. Powered it up. Played music. Waited.
It worked. It just… worked. Played for hours without a single dropout. That tiny, almost invisible crack was the culprit all along.
So yeah, searching for John Goodwin Nebraska felt a bit like that. You dig and dig, follow leads, hit dead ends. Sometimes you find nothing. Sometimes you find a tiny crack in the board that fixes everything. The main thing, I guess, is just the process of looking and trying stuff out. You never know what you’ll actually find, or fix.
