This was a repair amongst many I did for Southside Guitars last month over a marathon 2 day period. Simple amp, somehow it took up more bench time than the rest!
You're looking at a run of the mill used 1965 "Fender Electric Instrument Company" pre-CBS Vibro Champ. Lovely little buggers. The first time I ever played one was at this guys apartment in the 80's in Boston. He used a TS9 Tube Screamer into it to record my guitar tracks when I was a Berklee student. I was pretty floored at how good it sounded. I think he had a reel to reel or one of those cassette 4 track machines we all had in those days, the Fostex X15 or Tascam something or another.
Anyway. This one had very little volume. I popped the chassis and, well, you tell me what you see:
Yeah. Seriously. What the eff? That nice bit of lamp cord poorly soldered between the input of the volume knob directly to the 15k midrange resistor which goes to ground. So where you want to see up to 250k between you and ground, you get 15k maximum. I just don't understand what they were trying to achieve here! Did they put it together and say "Yeah, now that's the ticket to Hollywood baby?"
Why didn't they just undo it? Ugh......
That was the first thing to take care of and while it helped tremendously, there were plenty of other bugs.
Always start from the back and go forward. The speaker was an old alnico full range 8 ohm job with a whizzer cone. That wasn't helping any so I just threw in what we had that day, a reissue 4 ohm used Jensen Alnico speaker. That helped but still, meh.... blah.... lackluster. No bass at all.
They had replaced every single signal capacitor with used / leaky weak caps that were also the wrong values. I used Mallory 150s and if you notice, I grounded the amp and used the .047 "Death Cap" at the midrange capacitor cuz, why not? Reduce reuse recycle! And those never go bad and have a special sound.
I also replaced the tremolo caps with fresh ones as that was super weak and they had some weird stuff going on in there too.
But still, no bass and pretty sad tremolo.
Cathode caps..... no bass, sad tremolo. Tremolo is just an LFO right? Better have fresh cathode caps to get it strong. In fact, just replace them already! This amp is 56 years old now.
After that I still wasn't happy though. Tremolo was working albeit, just not awesome, and the bass would vanish when you turned the treble up. Weird......
So upon closer inspection I noticed the tremolo intensity pot was dated 1966, but no indication of the ohms. They always say 25K RA. So I pulled it and measured the thing. 500k. WRONG!
I dropped in a 50k pot since that was all I had on the shelf. Those 25K reverse audio pots are hard to find. The 50k pot isn't correct but it did make the tremolo work better. With the 500k pot there was almost no tremolo until you got up to about 8. So, while not satisfied this would work. I could also bypass it with a 47k resistor to make a fake 25k pot. I don't like doing this but in a pinch it does work and only the rabid amp fanatic can usually tell.
But that treble control bit was really driving me bananas. The amp still seemed weak too. So I then figured if the Bozo that modded this amp changed that tremolo pot to something so wack, maybe they changed a tone pot.
They didn't. The tone pots are the original 250kA pots dated 1965.
So I checked the volume pot. Lo and behold, it was the 25K RA Intensity pot I needed! Captain "Wha? TechNo No No" used the 25k pot and scrapped the 1Meg pot that was in there. I took that 25kRA pot and put it where it belonged and threw in a new CTS 1 Meg volume pot.
Now we're cooking with grease...... GREAT tremolo and GREAT tone!
The power transformer was replaced sometime in the 70's with the correct part. I did clean up the wiring there too. Come on folks, twist those AC lines already!!
In conclusion. I do not know what this person was trying to achieve with the mods they did. If they were trying to make the amp play with little volume, why not just turn the volume knob down? I imagine they may have been trying to get more tremolo so they used that 500k pot. Nope!
If you do not know what you are doing then please consult someone! Otherwise a fella like myself can spend hours undoing your ill conceived ideas. Seriously, ask. Most of us are happy to share information....
J
