Beginner wishes to build tube amp

All good suggestions. I'll add ANK.

ANK Audio Kits (Audio Note)

I just finished building my first tube project - a pair of monoblock 300B SET amps. They turned out great. I'm still burning them in and don't have them hooked up to my main system yet, but they sound very nice in my hobby room system. I created a build thread on the Steve Hoffman forum. Here's a link. 

300B Monoblock build thread

I built three Elekit amps.  They are perfect for the first timer because the instructions and layout is super.  Not to mention, Elekit products sound great.  

You can definitely take 1-2 hours of YouTube lessons on soldering and board stuffing and be fluent for this purpose.  

As noted above, be careful with amp-speaker matching.  Elekit (for the most) part are lower wattage designs. I think they may have a bigger Push Pull now. Viktor is the North American distributor for them. He's in Vancouver BC and responds to forum posts and emails.  He's super.  

Many years ago I built a pair of Bottlehead Paramour 2A3 SET tube mono amps. The build was very easy, instructions were good, and the builder's forum was helpful. I spent extra time on them, making them cosmetically attractive. They turned out great and I was even able to re-sell them here when I changed directions.

+1 for Ralph Karsten- Atmasphere amps.

The best part is that he’ll probably answer the phone if you need help.

And, you'll have an amp that will serve you well for a long long time.

Bob

+1 for Bob Latino amps.  I built one a few years ago. Great instructions, great amp and Bob is available and more then willing to answer any and all questions.  More important his amps have a great following and have a market if you decide to move up or change direction.   

If you can do with a really low-powered amp, there is the Elekit 300b amps.  I've heard that amp and it is quite good for the money.  It is supposedly quite easy to build because it comes with clear instructions with a lot of useful illustrations (very important, particularly for novice builders).  

ANK Audio Kits make a large range of electronic kits that are based on Audio Note (uk) electronics and might even use parts sourced from Audio Note.  I don't know how good the kit versions are compared to the real deal, but the real deal is very good.

good advice so far ! Match the amp to the speaker or risk not knowing what tge amp is capable of…Ralph @atmasphere used to offer  one of his OTL amps as a kit if ya really want to dive off the deep end of things in the quality frontier…

i am a robot with a solder wick

Bottlehead offers a forum section for the beginner with an entire thread devoted to "how to" videos. Have heard good things about these kits but I can not speak from personal experience. However, I am a builder by trade and after watching one of the videos I would not be frightened of taking on the project.

I would practice a bit with the solder before doing it for real.

Good Luck.

https://forum.bottlehead.com/index.php?board=55.0

Most of the major kits Spud amp, Transcendence OTL, Bob Latino Dynaco clones or Bottlehead amps have a quality end product and a very good support group forums around then and you couldn’t go wrong with any of them depending upon your determination and patience.

The big question is what kind of amp do you want to build and what speakers are you going to drive with it.

For simplicity and just starting out to learn the Spud amp is supposed to sound great and is really inexpensive to get into. Not a whole lot of power and is more of a gateway amp into the next level