1979 Fender Deluxe Reverb

[rake60]

I dabble a bit in electronics.

Actually it was my main field of study in tech school, but after 6 months of looking at the
same small workbench I decided I wasn't built to do that for the rest of my life.

I'm also a guitar abuser. 
When I guy at work told me that his kid had an old junk amp for sale for $25 I jumped on it!
I was a little shocked to see it was a 1979 Fender Deluxe Reverb.

The tubes were all junk, the capacitors were leaking and the cabinet was in pretty rough shape.
First came the electronics. 

All new tubes, capacitors and diodes brought it back to life.
A new handle, grill cloth and few touch ups to the vinyl finished it up.

OK, it was a total of $450 in parts, countless hours of driving to gather the parts, and
about 6 months of work, but....

You can't beat the sound of an old tube amp.
Even when that old bald guy if beating up the Epiphone Les Paul.  ;)

Rick

[Classic]

Rick, you're right, you can't beat the sound of an old tube amp.

We, my second son and I, have a mid 70s Bassman 100.  My eldest son, who is a studio engineer in Sydney, has a Bassman 50.  I picked them up when I had a repair business in the early 90s, and their owners saw them as not worth repair ???  Both amps have had caps replaced a couple of times.

It's good to see that you've left the wiring much the same as it was when it left the factory.  There's a "boutique" amp "tech" in Australia who posted on an Aussie forum a picture of basically the same wiring with the caption "Hack Butcher Strikes".  He then stripped it and rewired it with all wires in anally straight lines with right angle bends.  I guess you know that right angle bends are the enemy of high voltages in tube amps.  I posted a shot of the guts of our Bassman, to show that the wiring was factory original, but he chose to ignore the fact that he had effectively turned a genuine old Fender into just another amp.

In the past few weeks, he found another that had definitely been badly hacked, but he again did the straight lines with right angles wiring.

Congratulations on a great find and restoration job.

Peter.

[Brass_Machine]

The sound from tube amps is awesome. I plan to do some DIY audio when I can afford it and want to do a tube amp.

Pete..

I guess you know that right angle bends are the enemy of high voltages in tube amps.

I am still a newbie to electronics... why is right angles the enemy?

Eric

[Classic]

Eric, a hard right angle bend creates a point from which you can get a corona discharge.  This produces ozone, which damages the insulation.  Corona discharge isn't an arc, just leakage of charge into the surrounding air, with a blue corona that you can see with the lights off.  From there, it just takes a bit of dust and moisture to form an arc to the nearest ground, with subsequent damage.  The plate supply voltage in tube guitar amps is high enough to create this effect.

Pete.