Private Amp From a Old Personal Cassette Player

hi folks today im going to help all our guitar playing friends improve their relationships with neighbours and or family.
no im not going to personally give them each 50 bucks to leave you alone what im going to do is supply you with the knowhow to make a small guitar amp that will only annoy you {well it may annoy you if you play bad like me}.
best of all it only takes about 10 minutes to do

Step 1: What Yer Gonna Need

ok to do this your going to need
1. old personal casstte player that you dont mind destroying
2. guitar cord that you dont mind cutting an end off{ we all have one that only works when you bend it}
3. a fine soldering iron and rosincore solder{you can sharpen the point of a cheap pencil iron}
4. a set of head phones
5. an electric guitar or acoustic with a pickup installed

Step 2: Theroy {sort Of}

ok now we all know that an electric guitar generates a very weak current when you strum the strings.
the playback head on a cassette player works on a similar principle {it generates an even weaker current when a magnetized tape is passed over the reading head}.
so if we take the leads from an electric guitar and solder them to the wires coming out of the cassette players playback head then press play on the player then we will hear the guitar in our headphones.
my theory actually worked (too well) much to my surprise .i had invisioned playing the tape and playing along with it too but the guitar was way too loud.
i know just turn down the volume knob on the guitar and i can fix that right?
not on my guitar anyway dirty pots mean that it only works in one or two places.
as a bonus this particular player had a 3 channel equalizer built in .
when its turned down on all of them the sound is nearly normal turn them up and it distorts like crazy.

Step 3: Where to Attach the Wires

what you need to do next is figure out which end of the cord is bad . i just cut mine in the middle and tested with a volt/ohlm meter and tossed the twitchy end.
then strip back the insulation until you have at least 1/4 inch of bare copper for both conductors{if your using a stereo cord with three conductors you will have to solder the two insulated wires together}.
at this point you need to solder the wires onto the play head leads.
the braid{ground wire} will attach to the biggest contact on the play head, the wire in the center insulation will need to connect to both of the smaller contacts or you will have a mono amp.
it doesnt matter much if you get this backwards cause it will still work.
i will assume that most of you are familiar with the finer points of soldering if not there are several good tutorials out there on how too{i think there even some instructables on the subject}
as you can see i had to pluck out the rewind knob to make an access hole.
a better way than how i did it would be to trace the wires from the play head to where it connects to the circuit board inside .you dont even need to leave the play head connected.

Step 4: Conclusion

since i made this i have seen several variations on a similar theme. most of them are neater than this job .
remember when selecting a player for this try to pick on one that doesnt work right this one had tape transport issues and would slow down and speed up unpredictably.
i know they aren`t antiques yet but they are a vanished technology and getting rarer all the time.
thanks for looking and if you do one of these and make a better job (or not) of it please post it.

lenny

attached {i hope } you will find 4 samples recorded from this mini amp
please note i just did extremes as a sample to let you get a feel for the range available .
im sure somewhere in the middle will sound better.
my apologies for the crappy playing
lol