The Amp Garage

I have been getting my AC power cords from CE. The AWG 16 is a bit fat, a little too fat for the strain relief in the Silverface and Blackface Fenders that I often work-on. I have wondered, for a while, what other folks are using. Fender Blackface and Silverface amps ...What's a good strain relief a...

I'm gonna drop in a new Hammond 1750M in a few days and see what happens. That's what's in the other one, and that OT always does me right! If I get a chance I'll swap the lil guy in the other amp, but I'm gonna work on the amp as-is, as I'm curious what it's gonna take, if anything, to get it work...

I am assuming that you want the other color for use with the green in a twisted pair for heaters. I ran into this issue with the 18g wire and never found any so I solved my problem by cutting two equal lengths of the green that I would twist for heater use. Before twisting the wires I would take a ...

Looking for old Fender-style cloth covered solid-core 18 AWG wire. Hoffman has some green, but I need to find some yellow, or black. Any leads on where I can find some? There is some PVC insulated wire with cloth cover I stumbled onto in a Google search, that's not what I'm looking for, I want the c...

I have had Fender blackface-like buids where I tried Heyboer (custom, with M6) - too brite, Magnetic comonents-too brite, Hammond (from their Fender drop-in line of OT's) - just right. I have no idea why! It is getting expensive to blindly try OT'ds. Plus, A-B-ing is kind of a pain. I wish I knew ho...

What do you folks think about the type of steel used in output transformers? Seems like when I get OT's with grain-aligned M6 steel that they seem brighter, in a way that I don't care for.

Any opinions on this?

Thanks for the info.

I buff the chassis, then, coat with a no-ox compound (i.e., where a good electrical contact to the chassis is needed).

Another Holland Lil Jimi found its way into my shop. This one had the same problem: The design/layout relied on the pots case making good contact to the chassis to make the ground reference of the vol (and other) pots. Once again the aluminum chassis had oxidized suffiently such that the resistance ...

i worked on one of these and found that the cathode resistors in some of the preamp tubes were not large enough (in value) to stop grid current from flowing in said preamp tubes. A lrager cathode resistance cleaned up quite a bit of the hum problems, especially in terms of the grid current flowing t...

Eminence now makes their EM12

http://www.eminence.com/speakers/speake ... egend_EM12

Also, WGS now makes an EVM12L type of speaker.

http://wgs4.com/12-wgs12l-200-watts

to my ear, the grain aligned steel laminations have a briteness that I could not dial out, but, hard to separate that from the effect of the winding pattern itself.

Sonically, what do more interleaves do to the tone?

I am curious how people woild describe the tonal properties of various Fender (blackface) style output trannies. For example, let's consider the following brands: Hammond Magnetic components Mercury magnetics Heyboer and, let's consider 20-22W sized trannies., and 35-40W sizes too If you could use w...

So, I pull the pot out of the chassis hole (while the pot is still connected) and it works perfectly. Something going on with ground loops in terms of the threaded shaft of the pot coming into contact with the chassis. So, I have to bore-out the 3/8" hole to 1/2" and use insulting shoulder washers.....

I installed a master volume into a Dr. Z Prescription ES. Cathode biased, 4 EL84 output stage. Works great, until I turn it up all the way. Suddenly, at the last slight turn of the pot, there is hum that kicks-in. I thought maybe it was a bad pot or that perhaps some debris (solder, wire clippings) ...

it was a bad tremelo "bug"....All I can figure is that the bug resistance was too high and light needed to be on it to get its resistance low enough to work. In other words, the 2nd half of the 12ax7 that drives the bug couldn't drive it hard enough without some assistance from ambient light. At lea...