I re-designed the basic Sunnyside Amps aluminum chassis to make the build process more efficient. I just received a stack of new chassis’…..They look sweet!
Valco 510-11 in the shop
A neat little Valco, single output tube, tube rectified, one preamp tube..this thing screams when you crank it up. It needs a bias adjustment (it is running too hot as a result of todays higher wall voltages), and the owner wants an extension speaker jack..Since the amp has three input jacks we decided to convert one input jack to an ext. speaker output jack so that we could avoid drilling any holes into the vintage chassis!
Pictures and (possibly) video to come later….
1950’s Epiphone Electar “Dreadnaught” in the shop
Man, this amplifiers needs a lot of work. It was dead on arrival….it is so old that some of the wire has almost turned to dust…..bad pots, bad input jacks, and more!
Note the field coil speaker, and this amp uses octal pentode preamp tubes..they don’t make ’em like this anymore!
Nice woodwork and grille work!
Bringing a 1965 Fender Vibrochamp back to life!
Bad power supply capacitor can, bad output transformer, bad rectifier tube…and more. But, I do like working on the old blackface Fenders cause everything is so accessible…a pleasure to fix them!
What a great week we had last week!
Last week I had the great pleasure of providing two K-Verb amplifiers for Steve Kimock to use at his three-night stint with Bill Evans’ “Soulgrass” band at “Jazz Alley” in Seattle.
I love the tone Steve gets, it’s the kind of tone I generally had in mind when I developed these amps.
Steve played beautifully, and it made me very happy to hear such good sounds coming out of these amps that I have labored so long and hard at.
Thank you Steve for your openess to giving these amps a try, and nice to meet you!
** See audio/video page for some nice clips of Steve playing the K-Verbs
Lower-wattage K-Verb on the Horizon!
Due to popular request there will be a lower-wattage K-Verb available in the not so distant future. Somewhere around 20-25W, a slightly reduced feature set, maybe a slightly smaller Cab….Stay tuned!
Revising the K-Verb chassis
I have been working’ on revisions to the Aluminum chassis design for my K-Verb amplifiers. These changes will help make the building process a little more efficient!
Got to love all the modern-day CAD tools!
Fender Hotrod Deluxe troubleshooting
Today I was working on a Fender Hotrod Deluxe,,,power was dropping-out…and a few loud bass notes were causing a crackling sound. These amps (really all amps!) can act-up in mysterious ways. After investigating for a while I found two bad connections that were causing the problem.
Debugging electronics is lke being a detective trying to solve a crime. You come up with possible theories, and make experiments to see if the theory holds together. When you finally get to the bottom of it it is quite a gratifying moment. Eureka!
Fender ’64 Vibroverb
Today I’ve been working-on a new-“ish” Fender re-creation of the 1964 Blackface Vibroverb amplifier. Not a bad amp, easy to fix (like the old blackface and silverface hand-wired amps). Some of the parts are kinda skimpy (like some 1/4W resistors), the chassis is not quite as solid as the old ones were, but overall it is fairly well built.
Potentiometer talk
Vintage pots have a different taper than newer pots. For example, on, say, an old Fender Blackface amp (with original pots) turn the volume pot to halfway and the pot passes roughly 30% of the signal through it. Newer CTS and Alpha pots , if turned to halfway, pass about 10% of the signal through it. Lets say the volume pot on your Blackface super reverb fails and needs replacement. You might perceive the amp as having less power because now you have to turn the volume to 6 where you might have only turned it up to 3 or 4 previously. I have found that this has a pychological effect on many players. That is, if the volume control needs to be turned-up to 6 the amp “seems” to have less power than an amp where you only have to turn the volume to 3. What is needed here is to actually listen to the amp to see how loud it is and how clean or distorted it sounds, and try to forget about the numbers. Set the controls for what you hear!