1940's Kalamazoo KEA

 Curious little bargain tube amp that I got to bring back from the dead..... a 1940's Kalamazoo KEA.

This is one circuit that I'll admit I have little idea of how it works. It has a single 6SJ7 driving a pair of 6V6 tubes. How this is achieved I do not know. It's not parallel single ended. Look at the schematic!

The other challenge was finding a 10" speaker that is shallow enough to fit in such a tight space. This project sat around and almost made the 'sold for parts as-is' pile. Nothing fit! But fortunately I was able to find an old CTS speaker in the bowels of Southside Guitars deep in the basement under discarded case parts...... It was dead so we had it re-coned. Speaker had the perfect holes to mount the output trasformer.

In the end it's a fantastic little amp. Not a fuzz box, very clear and defined. These are financially not worth the effort, you'll likely lose money doing what I did. But we were all so blown away by it's charming tone that an employee bought it and will be tracking with it! I have an affinity for the 6SJ7 tube. My favorite preamp of all time so it's not surprising how much I like this amp. 

Did the usual, changed the caps etc. Fortunately both transformers were good. I do not think this amp would work well without that odd asymmetrical output transformer. So make sure that part is happy before you commit to one of these. 

J

1947 Fender Model 26 "Woody" amp

 I thought I'd share about this one.... very rare bird indeed. A Fender Model 26 "Woody" circa 1947.

This came through Southside Guitars with the matching lapsteel. Unfortunately both transformers were destroyed. The good thing is I managed to buy some period correct NOS iron that worked perfectly. I don't think one needs to be too precious in what iron one uses as I believe Fender used what was available in these early days. I could be wrong about that but either way the amp turned out to be fantastic sounding.

I needed to replace every capacitor in the house and some resistors. Curiously rather than using a 250 ohm 5 or 10 watt resistor for the cathode bias circuit, Leo used 2 500 2 watt ohm resistors going from pin 8 to ground with a wire connecting the two with a single 25@25 volt cap on the board. I replaced those with some pretty NOS 500 ohm 5 watt wire wound resistors. 

The speaker was shot but original so I had it re-coned. Always the best choice I feel, especially with these. There is no place to mount the output transformer except on the speaker. Worked out nicely!

One peculiarity with this amp is the tone control. It's the worst I've ever seen. It's a 2 meg pot and a .05 capacitor going across the anodes of the 6V6 tubes. Oh, it worked, very dark, turn the pot then like a switch it's full on. That goofy taper doesn't actually bug me but what does is when you blast the amp you can see sparks inside the pot! I asked the owner if I can wire it somewhere else in the circuit, like a normal tone control. Better to not have an amp flame up. It's fine at moderate volume but who wants that with a little scream box like this????

I can say this amp sounds incredible. Very colorful, very rich and quite loud. More "primitive" than a later Deluxe and has a focused sound with that 10" Jensen speaker. 

One that is worth building if you are into that sort of thing. Experiment with that tone control I say!

Schematic:

Old school construction!!!! :

Original Jensen dated 1946.....