Bring me your tired and huddled masses, your forlorn and neglected chassis…..

 

    I’ve been away for far to long and would like to get caught up a bit.  I thought it was time to layout some of the unusual amps to grace my humble workbench in the last year.  I have to acknowledge my main Benefactor, from whom almost all of these Beauties have come from.  They’ve been abused to varying degrees and most often just needed some TLC and some cleaning up.  The power supplies are the hardest hit, with oozing filter caps and rotted B+ wires.  Then comes the head scratching part.  I almost always find dubious repairs or mods done by folks with widely different levels of skill and or knowledge about things electric.  Which usually sends me back to consult the Google for any existing photo documentation about how it was supposed to look like.

 

   The amp above is  currently gracing my bench, and I must say is probably the rarest thing I’ve seen yet.  The beautiful 50’s Hi-Fi inspired Klemt BS40 head.  I don’t know a lot about the Klemt amps, except that they made a series of amps and echo units from the late 50’s to early 70’s?  Everything I’ve seen has wonderful vintage vibed sheet metal and appointments that would have been right in place with your Dad’s (scratch that)  your Grand Dad’s Fisher Stereo gear from the 50’s.  They also apparently beat Marshall to the punch by producing a Bassman copy some time before Marshall came out with the famous JTM45.  I can’t wait to get this thing cleaned up and safely back in working order.

 

Next up, another rare European offering, the Carlsbro PA60R.  A 4 channel, 60 watt PA head with the most awesome reverb I’ve heard this side of Fender’s infamous stand alone reverb unit.  This thing will Surf!!!  Plus it’s loud and clean, leaning more towards Hiwatt than Marshall.  They were produced in the UK thru the 60’s and 70’s, following Rock’s classic hey days.  They still produce gear today, but not quite like these early offerings.

I’m sorry that I don’t seem to have a picture of the outside, but I like the insides as much so here you go.  The main problem with this one (and there were a few) was that during previous repairs, some of the traces on the underside of the circuit board had come apart or lifted and there were numerous globbs of wire and solder to try and bypass the loose traces.  This required a bunch of clean up work to make them stronger and more stable as well as prettier (that’s tech jargon).  Anyway, it’s a real beauty and sounds fantastic and different from all the Marshall Wanna Be’s.

 

This was another seldom seen offering from Epiphone, The Mighty Futura (otherwise known as the Gibson GA30RVT Invader).  It had four 10″ speakers, reverb and tremolo and used 7581’s and 6EU7’s, for about 30 watts of vintage tone.  I actually kind of liked this one, for exactly that.  It wasn’t very loud, and the reverb sounded like ass, but had a nice swampy trem circuit and really browned out when the trem & reverb were running.  It’s major claim to fame was that it was the amp that Mike Bloomfield was playing when he was breaking big.  To that end, it was interesting to find the original receipt inside, along with a torn out page from a Guitar Player mag showing Mr Bloomfield playing it. Cool!   This one was a workout however, and I was surprised it hadn’t caught fire yet (really).  There were some questionable rewiring of the mains power switch, which was done on a 4 level multi position wafer switch.  No wonder it had a horrible power supply hum!!   After completely rewiring that to eliminate the AC switching and ground cap polarity flip, and replacing all the filter caps (including getting rid of one of the infamous Gibson Party Hats), and various other leaky coupling caps and a shorted out reverb transformer and a mystery voltage arc on the trem tube socket and…….  It sounds really nice now.

Here’s one you don’t see everyday, Thankfully!  It’s a Fenler Deluxe Reverb.  What?  One more time for the hard of hearing, A FENLER!

   This was a laugh riot.  Got it operating safely with an absolute minimum of time and sent it packing.  I think these were made in the Japan during the war to sell to GI’s stationed in the Philippines.  Oh Nostalgia!,  it’s just like home here.  Anyway, it was dirty and stinky and had mouse poop and sounded like crap.  It’s hard to imagine that anyone would mistake it for a real Deluxe Reverb.  Well, I need to wrap up this first instalment.  I will be back shortly with more Tales from the Crypt.  Stay tuned……

~ by mmandjk on August 20, 2012.