Planning

 It's been clear from the start that planning is crucial to a successful build, probably regardless of how you measure success, but especially for me since I'm so easily frustrated and flustered by mistakes. This amp seems particularly unforgiving of poor planning compared to the first two amps. I've done a lot of planning and prep for this one, but I think there have been at least a dozen times I have started to do something semi permanent - drill a hole, solder a connection, spec-tighten a nut - and paused to think one last time about the next few steps to come, and realized I should NOT do the thing I was about to do. The Hiwatt layouts from the early days are certainly different than the two I've built (based on Hoffman Amps' layouts strategy) and most others I've seen, and I'm guessing the two separate circuit boards, the front to rear combined with right to left circuit flow, and the limited two-row main circuit board requiring lots of underboard jumpers and connections, all contribute to the practical complexities of this build. However, for each time I caught myself before making an error, I've probably made two others that could have been avoided with a bit of forethought. 

Hopefully I'm improving... mainly, I suppose, for the sake of exercising my problem solving and planning skills generally, as it's hard to see building another amp anytime soon... probably the last amp for a while... just don't need another one... nope.

Recent progress

Populated main board and soldered all finished connections, leaving those points connected to off-board components unsoldered: 

Completed the impedance selector, speaker out, line out bits:

Input jack, channel selector, channel gain pots, overdrive push-pull selector pot:

Tone, master volume and presence pots pre-wired and installed:

Now I'll do as much testing as I can just to make sure there's circuit continuity at least, and to make sure all the pots work in the right direction, and that all solder joints are good. Then I'll install the main board and complete all connections.