Messages

that pcb vise is my next purchase ... I went shopping around to step up my helping hands game(thanks to reading this thread) and ran across that ... got to be better than this junky harbor freight set I have now.

the vintage switch wouldn't be hard to do(just need to make sure it switches both circuits or you have two toggles), nor would the parallel/series switch and output jack(well documented) ... and the synch switch would just mean you need a dual gang pot on the first phase and a 3pdt on/on switch to toggle between the unused gang on the first phase and the pot on the second phase. so find 2 phase 90 pcbs with a vintage switch and hack in the other switching/pot(s)

after reading the owner's manual there's two internal switches, sw6 will let you toggle the parallel output between the second output jack and a summed output on jack 1 ... that might be tricky(potential phase cancellation) and they don't say what switch 5 does other than it needs to be "up" ... so now I'd want a schematic.

the early boards tended to be full of errors and necessary hacks(being honest, not mean), the quality has improved and the pricing has always been fair considering the shipping and the selection of stuff offered. I'm not sure I'd go with a kit or a single PCB purchase due to shipping costs unless I was in the UK to begin with. I'm waiting on a shipment of pcbs from him at the moment if that helps.

double check the work done modding it first and foremost

as said above, most common example I could think of would be the clipping diodes and tone control from the proco rat. basically put that on a switch. nice part is you could mount all of your components on the pot as everything is going to ground.

I tried to sell the wife on Resolute, Nunavut ... she wasn't buying

the funny part of this was that I asked myself this question right before I put that one up for sale.

src effects but they're expensive

brutal doom ... counterstrike source ... on console, Mario Kart 64  and Goldeneye 64

the last time I went without central heating was living in Florida where we had a room heater for the handful of cold days a year ... in Kansas, grateful to have heat.

Got home from work to find a working vintage Knight Wideband Oscilloscope my wife scored for $25 off a local fb b/s/t ... a Cinco De Mayo miracle!

its all good, I'm as stubbornly opinionated about turning vintage pa amps, organ amps, and heath kits into guitar amps vs starting with a kit ... "ITS A TRAP!" which isn't well received either.

as an aside, I just couldn't play an amp named "Wangs".

sure, the valve jr is well documented as a mod platform and I've done a number of them but overall I like to remind people that the price point of that new was less than what Sears sold the Silvertone 1481 for (inflation adjusted) and it sounds as cheap. even after all of them I've worked on, I still don't think of them as easy to work on compared to others. the silver lining is that you can take that gift you didn't ask for or that insane bargain you beat someone up on via craigslist and turn it into a number of different amps, reverb unit, etc. I just wouldn't actively seek one out as an amp or a project.   

re the blackheart: its what the valve junior would have been at a realistic price point. it was designed with modification in mind, it was a completely better design, and unlike the valve jr sounds just fine stock.

re: bugera ... I don't have an opinion outside of the few I've worked on having heat issues leading to power tube related component failure. I should have been more specific that I was referring to the old bugera v5 and that's because I wasn't exactly bowled over on the sound.

I think most of these went away when the fad was over.

new: the blackstar does sound nice. got a lot of ICs in there doing some of the heavy lifting, but it does sound nice.
used: vht is much cheaper to buy used(I feel you're getting hurt buying one new due to no good resale value)
out of production: I like the blackheart little giant even if it doesn't have tons of gain
vintage: silvertone 1481, the one with the round speaker baffle hole.
diy: supro s1606/gretsch 6150 from watts tube audio
avoid: valve jr, bugera, fender champ 600

This is a two-fold problem.
The first problem is the sweep knob, which unless left at 0 resistance is going to lower the gain and darken the tone in a way that isn't recoverable by the tone pot. think about it like this, once you remove something you can't put it back in later and this control comes well before the tone control.
the second problem is the filter control is more of a "cut control" than anything and changing its position just alters the notch frequency of a low pass filter. you can broaden or narrow its range of frequencies or shift the limits both top and bottom but you can't really change how it works without replacing it. The larger problem you're going to see is that if you shift the control to cover more upper frequencies, the high end of the pot lets a lot of unwanted frequencies in and the tone gets pretty strident and noisy and you'll end up with a bottom end of the pot where you just don't have much if any bass content.