A Fender Blues Jr Mk III arrived in the workshop. It was dead. The amp was opened up. One EL84 output valve was completely destroyed. The other had most of the getter gone in the valve , suggesting long hours of use. The white material inside the valve indicated a slow gas leak that eventually killed the valve. The EL84 failure had blown one of the screen resistors on the main pcb and this resulted […]
Resurrecting a Fender Supersonic 60 Amp This is the tale of a fender Supersonic 60 Head almost self destructs What Happened? This Fender Supersonic 60 Head was a smoking amp – literally . While playing there was a strong smell of burning and smoke then the amp blew the mains fuse. What was the cause? I open up the amp and there is soot covering everything. It looked like ashes from a forest fire it
Summary of this amp A lovely Fender Blackface Deluxe Reverb 1966 came to us. It was extremely noisy and the reverb was crackling and popping. It was a USA 110 volt AC model and so used a step down transformer to enable it to run in the UK on 230 voltsThe amp was all original apart from the power supply capacitors and the choke having been changed. It is very unusual ( at least to
Getting that Superb Fender Tone Blackface and Silverface Fender amps were renowned for their clean sounds which moved to nice gentle bluesy break up when pushed hard. How did they achieve this? Fender chose their valves/tubes carefully to produce this wonderful palette of sounds that players just love. If you are country or blues player you are in heaven with these old amps. They command high prices for good ones especially from 1963- 73.
It is common design practice overrunning output valves. It is done with all types . There are some amps that use EL34’s and run them way over 500 volts. This is well above and beyond the maximum ratings of certain manufacturers. It is inviting trouble as the valves age, they have the possibility of flashing over and failing. We see similar effects with EL84’s. This is not a new phenomenon. Amp companies have been doing
 Quick Intro to the Fender Bassbreaker 007 The Fender Bassbreaker 007 is a cute little valve amp. There are two versions – a head and a combo. It has two 12AX7 pre-amp valves and one EL84 output valve. It has a 10 inch Celestion speaker. A nice compact practice amp. Check it out on the Fender website. Fender quotes this amp as 7 watts audio output in the manual. It does not say whether
Here are Things learned about Tube Amps in 2018 . They are in no particular order. Perhaps some useful info about your amp. I thought I would share them before they faded out of my head Loudness Your ears respond to sound like a compressor.  So when you ears hear the sound from a 10 watt amp and a 100 watt amp, you don’t hear an amp that is ten times louder.  Your ears hear