The Amp Garage

I like the sound of a Champ... but I want my Rocket to sound like Brad Paisley

I measured 69R1 vs 77R on the OT primary. Dissipation at 60.8mA vs 51mA. Then I swapped the output tubes right to left, and got Dissipation at 52.1mA vs 59.7mA. They're mismatched, but not much. Should be fine, in my experience. Yours? THE GOOD NEWS is that the amp sounds stellar with my Weber Mass...

I'm laughing because of the trouble I've been having with hum in my Rocket build. I've tried to minimize the number of ground paths to the chassis, with no success in reducing the hum, and here you've got no fewer than 13 chassis connections, and you report "low noise floor." Obviously grounding sc...

More progress... I went ahead and put in the KT66 output tubes. They really sound nice!!!! This is a great sounding clean amp and all my hopes have been rewarded with the tone this thing delivers. It's really got a low noise floor and is well behaved so far. I finished up most of the wiring that I h...

I'm along for the ride... looks like a great project and I know the Rocket builds tend to be a pretty friendly platform for adding your own flavor to them. I used a 5U4 rectifier in one of my earlier Rocket builds and I thought it sounded really good. Looking forward to the rest of this build.

I hit this thing pretty hard this weekend, thinking I was nearly done... I wasn't. However, I kept at it and finally I have made it to a major milestone. I have the Normal mode wired up and functional. I found a couple things but generally it was pretty close just following my schematic and layout. ...

Tony, I like the PTP build. Don't feel bad about walking on a thread, I am stoked that you have some useful info that may save me some steps in tweaking this thing. I like it that similar ideas are being developed simultaneously... although I'm not sure if it means we are both very clever or equally...

I really like the idea, the minimal loss but useful bass and treble are nice. I have been scheming on something similar thing based on a Supro, with its paraphase, 6973s and quirks. Looking at the schem, I am wondering if the volume pot in the circuit feeding the OD will be too interactive. A chang...

Marcus, nice job of using what you have and creating an Express... That's something Ken Fischer was known for. Thanks for sharing this with us... we all learn and benefit from these threads. rj

I was able to do a little more on this build and put together a circuit board. I did have to tweak it a bit from the layout drawings. I'm not sure what was going on with my design on the dropping string of the power supply but I implented a change there. I think I had terminals 4 and 5 reversed and ...

No noise issues in my 5879's. All mine are marked RCA, but i heard regardless of brand they were all made by RCA. What date codes or lots are you having issues with? I finally found that the random noise was actually coming from the AC power and it is not the 5879 tubes... I just had the misfortune...

Nice looking build... lemme know if you have tweaks that are so good I ought to consider updating the schematic and layout. Even though that build has been around for a while I still run across a good tweak here and there. These days I like a modifed Fender tonestack above the Vox or modifed Marshal...

Thanks JPH, we all learn a little form these kind of posts. I suspect the DC resistance of the choke was less than your 470R resistor... FWIW, the typical Rocket choke is around 400 ohms. Also, one interesting note is that occasionally that screen voltage and plate voltage can be essentially the sam...

Yes, I think some folks refer to them as a "Belton Brick". I would be curious if I could slip one in here with minimal trouble? I currently use a reverb pedal but this amp has me curious if I could get the Overdrive and reverb on board and travel a little lighter? I did some more work on the amp ove...

After I got caught up a bit on other things I went back to this and wired up the output transformer. This particular OT has dual primaries of 6.6K and 5.2K and I've decided to go with the 5.2K on this amp. I did leave a little tag end of the 6.6K pair if I change my mind sometime in the future. Noth...