Had one of these on the ol' desk today, a Trace Elliott Velocette. I remember when these first hit the scene. The crazy 90's "there are no good cheap tubes except EL-84s being made so let's make little boutique sorta VOx sounding sorta Marshall sounding amps" era.
This amp came to me dead. No sound, no lights. Fuse was good, I had a hunch it was an internal fuse or the filament was dead. I haven't seen one of these in years but last one I worked on had a filament line issue.
All tubes test good, high voltage is good. Yup, too much Bimoze on the filament line.
What's a Bimoze? I really don't know. I just like saying that.
So anyway, these amps are built in the typical modern fashion. With a crappy mother board where most of the components are attached. This includes your tube sockets as well. I never liked this. I'm not opposed to p.c. boards, but come on. Hand wire those tube sockets will ya? It's just better and more reliable. I know, I know. It cuts into profit. I'll shut up.
So the filament line comes off the power transformer into a connector that gets connected to the p.c. board that gets connected to another smaller connector that has wires going to 3 other connectors that connect to each tube. See something wrong with this sentence? It's a run on sentence and I say connector way too many times.
Photo of where the filament line connector meets another connector. Look at all that hot glue..... Got real handy with a razor today. Also notice the heat stains around the smaller black connector.
The underside:
This amp isn't very hard to get apart, that I appreciate. I just turned down working on an amp that I knew would be a nightmare. Life is too short.
More underside:
Hard to tell but wherever there is high current, there are cracked solder joints. This means filament line, high voltage line and speaker. Best to just touch up all of them while you are in there. Also touch up joints on jacks and pots. You can see what I'm talking about if you have a magnifying glass.
Connectors removed:
I wound up hard-wiring where the connector went to connector #2 on the first power tube. Lights on!
But..... after I put the amp back together, the other 6BQ5 tube wouldn't light up. Whack a Mole on such a simple amp! That connector was bad as well. In order to un-solder these connectors you need to remove the tube sockets. Um, EFF THAT!.
So I wound up removing all of these crappy connectors and hard wiring all of the sockets on the other side of the board. Now this little feller makes music. And sweet music it does make. These are really nice sounding amps. Almost has a 'gypsy jazz' quality to it. Warm and dry, cuts nice. They are cathode biased so you may pop in fresh tubes at will.
Speaking if which, one tube did start red-plating. They were just horribly mis-matched so I popped in one that was close. The only sets I have are JJs. Lovely sounding but I popped in 2 sets and they both started red-plating! I don't trust JJ EL-84 for class a operations. They are great for a Blues Jr properly biased but even in this amp, I don't like the risk.
Modern tubes.....bah.
I do like the styling of this amp. It looks like a cross between a vintage British racing car and a French bicycle.
Laziness #2:
Why write the serial number in pen?:
Can you read that? Oh well.
I would love to get one of these and gut it entirely then build a proper amp inside. But even stock, yeah, I would gig with this amp. It's strong point is that sweet, friendly voice it has. More my style then a Fender Pro Jr, which is a similar amp in some ways. I'm a huge fan of cathode bias. The sound produced is infectious.
JB
When I got my first (when Trace was blowing them out), I quickly went and got a second. A couple of years later I decided to turn the lesser of the two into money and sold it. I kept the first forever.
ReplyDeleteA couple of years ago I got the itch to have a second again, only to find that they are fairly rare on the used market, at least in the US. I lazily kept an eye out for one and bought a Gibson Gold Tone (GA-15), which I wasn't happy with. I kept storing up info one the Velocette (e.g. "What's a decent drop in replacement output transformer?" "What's the cleanest schematic I can find?" "What are good mods to slightly tame the high end for Telecaster use?" "Who in their right mind would ever even touch that 'bright' switch?")
I finally found another Velocette and jumped on it, mail order. It came in and it is nearly identical to my first, has the OT already replaced and sounds better than I recall my main Velocette sounding. I haven't gotten to putting them both together yet.
I bought a pair of GA-15 replacement OT's (Mojotone) for them. I'll either keep the one that came in the new amp or drop it in the GA-15 before I sell it. That thing is crap, more for extreme neglect than anything, but the "new" one is such a better mach for my old standby. I want them to match relatively closely. I have some matching and seemingly decent (modern) tubes in my shopping cart, but haven't pulled the trigger yet.
These are to be used in a stereo set up. I'm really excited about it. As far as the pen? Yeah, I took a close up photo of it so I could zoom in and actually read what it said. My two are fairly close in serial numbers though.
Thanks for your post!