Ordered the motherboard and control PCBs from www.audiokitchenpcb.co.uk.

After several evenings of research on the BOM (bill of materials) of the GSSL, I placed an order at Farnell (www.farnell.com).

The UPS delivery tried to ship the parts package for the first time.

The UPS delivery brought the package, but I hadn't realised I should've also ordered the upper and bottom plates for the rack case and someone at Farnell's warehouse had mixed up a power transformer with a 500 meter roll of wire. Everything else was fine, except some rare resistors weren't available at the time and these would be delivered afterwards.

Seems I'm always out of house when they come :) The UPS delivery tried to ship the missing power transformer and Farnell informed the rack plates will ship on 26th (monday). The shipping was free since they had messed the transformer delivery.
I placed an order for Lazertran transfer decals from UK at www.lazertran.com. (note: Many builders like NRG Recording (http://www.nrgrecording.de/html/lazertran.html) say to have gotten great results with it, but I didn't personally succeed with this method.)

The soldering started with IC sockets and then on with the resistors. Pretty soon it was obvious I need a small drill since over half of the resistors I had were too big for the 0.8mm diameter pre-drilled holes on the PCB. When buying the parts, take 0.25W to 0.5W metal film resistors, it doesn't need to be 0.6 watts. The PCB also gets quite crowded at some parts with the bigger resistors. The smaller resistors save you a lot of drilling work.

The UPS delivery guy called this time and I agreed for a delivery on the next day. Went shopping for a small PCB drill, electronic meter, XLR connectors for the chassis and couple of meters of shielded microphone cable. More soldering today.

The UPS delivery brought the power transformer and the missing rack plates. Coolness :)

Since I'm working on this a bit every evening, we are proceeding... Do just a little every day and you'll get it done - Don't take too much at once :)
And also read the Gyraf page, what they say especially about keeping your work desk tidy, is important.


My idea of a tidy desktop

I had a friend at work to cut the hole in the front plate for a meter with a small diamond blade cutter (ain't my tech language just brill) and the rack case front and back plates were sand blown for the neat look :)

I definately needed a new soldering iron and a bigger drill.

The UPS delivery brought me the missing 20kohm resistors (3pcs). After changing these I spotted a few bugs (one missing jumper (ground - ground, don't know if it was relevant), a bug in the unbalanced test connection and a soldering fault which had caused the copper face on the PCB to peel off, and we needed a jumper here too). After a boot the machine works, it's SILENT and HUM-FREE, heaps a lot better than what I had ever imagined it to become! :)

The first method of inserting the Lazertran decal mirrored face down and baking in oven didn't work, leaving peeling decal all over the plate and some sudden burn marks from the oven-burned glue on the surface, so I had to get the back plate sand blown again after messing around with the decals.

The Lazertran transfer decals didn't work for the back panel. I tried also the second method of decal face-up, insert-on-alcohol-surface, which left me with scratches here and there since the glue on the back of the decal doesn't come along smooth. The decal didn't either turn in to transparent after painting it with varnish, so the white damaged glue surface is visible through the decal. Now I also have two different packages of varnish laying around, maybe I'll do some refurbishing of furniture in the future. Speaking of future, I decided to leave the transferring of graphics for the front panel and go on to get the front plate sand blown again. The back plate won't be visible when the unit is racked, so I won't probably bother tuning it anymore.

A big NO-NO for Lazertran on this project

The pots got shortened to fit the knobs and the compressor has been installed, and it works :)
After a couple of days of surfing I noticed an interesting thread regarding side chain expansion for the compressor, which allowed the GSSL unit to be expanded in to the original Oxford unit. The difference between the two is in the signal path of the side chain, where GSSL is reading a mono sum of the incoming signal and processing the stereo material against that sum. This affects the way it behaves, and although pumping in dance music is trendy, it is critical especially on mixes with a loud bassdrum in the middle. This is a big reason why people are building high pass filters for the side chain, to prevent the unit from tackling with the bassdrum too much. The Oxford unit reads stereo input also on the side chain, so it's a different beast. See the video below for the explanation of the case

The "Expat Audio Turbo kit" has now been installed and it really improved the behaviour of the compressor. Not saying the GSSL was bad, but the upgrade made it a lot more transparent for working with the master bus.

Buy the Expat Audio Turbo kit at www.expataudio.com
Also read the comprehensive installation manual that makes things really easy Turbo kit PDF

Also the graphics were planted on the front panel, this time with Safmat transfer decals... and also they are a bitch to handle. Since I don't have an A3 printer I had to create the panel from A4 cutouts. Safmat is made by Letraset (www.letraset.com) but don't order yet, next I'll tell you why.

Resistor mod on the Turbo kit due to 'rare' resistors at local supply


The rat's nest :)


Face mask beta

I wasn't too happy with the outcome of the graphics around the VU meter. The black stripes weren't totally cut and the Safmat film right at the point got damaged in the cutting process. It is feather thin, it doesn't stick all that well on sand blown aluminium (you naturally need a totally solid surface for this), it tends to bend itself on a roll, and when this happens you get either nasty folds and fingerprints on the film when trying to unroll it, or the glue surface sticks to the opposite glue surface and leaves the other part of the film without any glue. Or you get both - anyhows it's done for. It might be a good idea to work in small cut outs but then you are left with relatively visible stickers on your plate, especially when the backside is not solid enough.
This is the point where I want to point you in to the direction of pre-made cases by Tat Purusha.
The reason(s) why I didn't go for this case is I didn't know if the power transformer would fit a 1U case, and I also had a too big VU meter that I had saved from an old Pioneer tape wreck in 1996 for a purpose exactly like this (the new VU meters are around 50e at Farnell and DIY is often about the budget - otherwise you'd be buying the originals (if available)).
I went in for a purple stripe -style when upgrading the design, the idea for the color came from my girl friend who liked the Purple Audio products. Ain't she the best :)

References and thanks to
Gyraf Audio for such a great DIY
Audiokitchen for the professional stage PCBs
Expat Audio for offering the marvellous expansion kit
Guys at the Prodigy-pro forum for being so active and helpful for everyone with this project
Roland Klinkenberg for showing his own GSSL DIY

And yeh, the parts were around 500e+ but you can save quite a lot here if you search for more suppliers than just Farnell (ie. most of the resistors came in bunches of 50pcs whereas all I needed was 1-10pcs).
Thanks for your time, and for those who got interested of this subject, I hope you'll build a great GSSL one day yourself! :)