The Amp Garage

These get addictive. Did a ZWreck/Rocket type of a preamp with a few adjustments and tweaks. Very happy with the result. Extremely dynamic and reacts great with the guitar volume. The following sound sample (based on a popular song harmony) is Tele only for the two guitar tracks. Will do some more ...

R.G. wrote: ↑Sun Oct 22, 2023 5:23 pm So it was a shorted snubber cap??

I didn't test any of the caps when pulled. I just replaced all the diodes and moved on. So far so good. I played a show with it yesterday and amp worked perfectly.

Just wanted to follow up and say that replacing the snubber caps with diodes has cured the amp. I've go probably 20 hours and 100 cycles on and off with no issues. Thanks for the quick help!

remove the snubber caps.. put 2 diodes insted on one, so in total 8 pcs..move standby to the AC line, DPDT, sw.off both lines of transformer instead this DC Thanks bepone, I'll ditch the snubber caps first see if this stabilizes things bepone has a good guess: failing snubber cap. In situations lik...

johnnyreece wrote: ↑Thu Sep 28, 2023 7:29 pm Just checking; do you have the PT center tap *and* the diode bridge connected to ground? I believe that would do it.

center tap is tied off and not grounded

After about 20 hours of play,tune,play,tune with this 100w amp I've built. The mains fuse blows. I pull the tubes and it blows again, so now I go through the debug process. AC line only - fuse holds Wire in HV and fuse blows. So I find a failed diode in the rectifier section. I replace all 4 and C12...

maxkracht wrote: ↑Sat Aug 05, 2023 3:04 pm Should put some of that silicone sitting above your bench on the tilted filter cap. It will eventually rattle loose if you leave it like that.

Wes indeed. I'll go through and silicone things once I am done tweaking.

Just on quick examination, your flying bare PT 6.3V heaters look like they’re frighteningly close to your PT screen resistor leads. I once had an OT primary that used different colors and had my primary CT connected to a PT plate. Disconnecting and testing the primary resistance helped me connect i...

So I just finished this VH3 (headfirst) build and once I got it fired up It sounded bad. There tone was nasty and notes had the dreaded blocking distortion/crackle that got worst the harder I played. I put the guitar through the loop and same thing, so this ruled out all but 2 tubes. i changed them ...

Thanks for all the suggestions! The amp is getting better and I would say into a "tunable" state as opposed to I can't use this. It's interesting how the amp clearly has that 2204 thing going, but has allot of chime and this really nice harmonic bloom. I guess the combination of Cathode biased and n...

The amp is pretty straight away an 800 clone. Even my voltages are close to this schematic. I’ve just plugged my values in to the below schematic.

Cathode bias is not the cause of your complaints--changing to fixed bias won't solve any of your issues. You report 66mA current--is that for one tube or the pair? I hope it's for one tube only, because you need twice that current for the pair. 66mA is Per Tube Again, a schematic is worth a billion...

Hey all! It's been a minute since I've been around or done any tinkering, but I was jonesing to fire up the iron and got myself back into some builds. I found a deal on some local amps and picked them up this week. I was really just looking to play with some circuits I haven't built and ease into th...

awesome build and next level on the winding your own!

One of my favorite express builds ran about the same voltages and used 6k6 tubes . I thought it had just the right volume and didn't lose the Feel of a wreck.

I just start with a 100k pot in any build now. It is the easiest addition that has the greatest effect on the feel of the amp for me.