I bought a clone of a factory amp (trying not to stir up the rath of "Z" so I wont mention the name but you should be able to tell from my title which amo it is) off a fellow from here a while back.
It sounded fine, but I wanted to get it out of the huge chassis it was in, and rebuild it into a small box chassis like the 18 watter and TC15 come in. I also had a spare head cab I made that wasnt being used.
1st, I bought a blank chassis from Stephen, and drilled all my holes, and basically transferred the components over from the chassis (where the chassis was suspended and tiubes hanging down) to the new one, where the chassis was in normal position, and the tubes are upright. I had to flip the controls, etc and this caused the inputs and preamp tube (ef86) to be on opposite sides of the chassis. Although the amp worked, it was now pretty noisy and I figured it was due to the long run of wires criss-crossing the chassis and controls/inputs and also the wiring was pretty much a rats nest.
Recently I totally rebuilt the amp. Going by a layout I found on the net, I made a new turret board and re soldered up the components, re wired all the transformers and pretty much everything else. I switched the ef86 and 12ax7 tube locations to shorten the input to ef86 run.
Just finished it up, and it sounds awesome, just as quiet as when I got it!
I feel great - its my first total build from scratch and it went smoothly. I used a lot of tips from building Trinity amps (how to ground, etc) and I am very pleased.
ANyhow, here is a before and after shot of the chassis... remember, this is not how I got the original amp ( there was nothing wrong with it, except it was in a huge chassis) these are my before and after pics in the new small box chassis.
AJC
before:
after:
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