Hey everyone! New here, check out my homemade 1959 copy

[ROBO]

Hey guys! as the title says I am new here.
I have been playing music and been in bands for 14 years and have always messed around with gear and electronics.
I found this forum searching for different mods and such for an amp I built.
Here are some pics and a few details of it.
http://i180.photobucket.com/albums/x124 ... CN0282.jpg
http://i180.photobucket.com/albums/x124 ... CN0274.jpg
http://i180.photobucket.com/albums/x124 ... CN0078.jpg
http://i180.photobucket.com/albums/x124 ... CN0080.jpg
http://i180.photobucket.com/albums/x124 ... CN0076.jpg
http://i180.photobucket.com/albums/x124 ... CN0077.jpg

The chassis is from a really old glass face radio that was sitting in my grandfathers garage for a long time.
I gutted it and used some sheet metal on the inside to fill the unused holes then painted the chassis.
I gutted and reused the old air capacitors cans as homes for new 50-50 F&T caps for the pre-amp filters.
I trimmed down and used an old aluminum panel for the face plate, then marked all the holes for the pots and drilled them out.
I reused old sockets from tube equipment I salvaged from the trash and everything else I bought new.

Looking through my copy of "A desktop reference of hip vintage guitar amps" I found a simple straight forward 100W schematic I liked and it happened to be a 1959 Marshall. That's how I decided to build the amp.

I made a list of all the components I needed and ordered everything from tubesandmore.com except for the board's and standoffs I ordered it from turretboards.com
The transformers are all Hammond's. The tubes are all JJ's. The preamp is all 12ax7's and the power tubes are El34's.

Since the pics were taken I have gone back and used all shielded wire for the inputs, controls, and grids of V1 in an attempt to clean things up.

The layout is all backwards from what would be in a real Marshall and due to the funky tube placement the lead dress is a little wonky.

I have cascaded the gain stages to dirty it up and have also added a PPIMV with a dual pot to overdrive the preamp.

I plan to go back though it here soon and replace some off the coupling caps that accidents got a little burned while soldering in tight places, also going to make it so the cascaded gain stage is switch out of the signal when I am plugged into channel 1 instead of having it hardwired into the back of channel 1 full time.

All in all I am pretty happy with it, It is the first amp I built from scratch and it has a really unique and dirty overdriven tone but also has really nice clear clean tone too.

One issue I have never been able to track down though is the presence control, I have taken it out of the circuit because I get crazy squealing at certain volume levels as I sweep the presence. I figure I has something to do with the feedback loop but just haven't gotten around it digging into it.

Great forum from what I have read there seems to be a lot of good information and helpful people here.
Let me know what you guys think!
-ROBO

[rgorke]

Very cool project. Do you have any clips of how it sounds?

[ROBO]

I'll make a video and upload it to youtube and post a link.