I see this forum is still not very active and there are mostly beginners like me i want to start this post where you can share things what you learned so far. For me i'm starting with this Philips course for beginners from the seventies. It is in Dutch so not much help to English readers but it gives an idea what is arround on the Internet; https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1KEb4bKSOYFY_WQR-bKkaqD9OAu3IX3y5

I think i can complete this course at the end of next week. So i can safely work on normal solid state stuff, but still not at high voltage tube things. I saw an amplifier build from Triode Dick where even he was a bit cautious with messing with the almost 1000v B+ in his design.

My thinking for now is this, I can do whatever i want as an unexperienced beginner as long as i not dare to power up anything. I have 4 cats and i don't want to look at them as in a cartoon if somethings going wrong when i leave a project to grab a coffee. For that i have to move by bench i am working on now, from the living room to a seperate room where i can close out the cats. Not ideal but i can't take the risk if i really put some voltage in things.

I want to share here some simple things i come by while i'm learning. Hope others will do the same so we can learn together. These beginner things might be obvious to more experienced people so they don't even mention it in their video's or other sources.

This is what i found. In a very old brochure i found an add where they sold special screwdrivers to adjust those small potentionalmeters inside an amp. I thought you can use just a small screwdriver but you can't. You need a special tool for this to get more precise. This is available for almost nothing so i want to invest in it.

There must be so much more small details where experienced people not even bother to tell but for beginners it is not so obvious. I hope others will share small things like that here. That way we can learn from eachother small but important things. And avoid disappointment.