Thread: Fender amp copy
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Old 13th Sep 2019, 10:43 am   #9
retailer
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Join Date: May 2005
Location: Adelaide, South Australia
Posts: 541
Default Re: Fender amp copy

I checked out your Shaftesbury post looks like you are well on the way to getting it going, restoring old gear can be quite rewarding.

Some years back while I was at a salvage yard I noticed what looked like a guitar amp chassis in one of the electronics recycle bins I jumped in and retrieved it and $5 later it was mine - it turned out to be an Electronics Australia kit built 60W head Playmaster 117 running a pair of 6DQ6's in the output, it was (and still is) in a sad state most noticeable was the odour like stale urine. My guess is that the owner was frustrated at being unable to get it working so the band members all lined up and emptied their bladders onto it. The amp designers had used the Fender trick of using one of the unused valve socket pins as the terminating point for the grid resistor - forward a few years and the new crop of valves used that pin for a second screen or anode connection (I forget which) so a healthy 180 odd volts was fed to the grid resulting in almost instant red plating on powering up.

It is all there and I did getting it working correctly including the tremelo but one of these days I'll do a full restoration, strip it back to bare chassis have it re-plated and rebuild with all new period correct capacitors and carbon resistors.
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