Fiber board bites me in the ass again

[Pedro Vecino]

Oh okay. I see them practically black. Yeah, I've seen quite a few weird things on them. Thank you very much.

[Helmholtz]

I'm interested to know about conductive light grey boards as these can't contain conductive carbon black.

[Chuck H]

What you see in every old Fender, typically dark grey almost black. Unfortunately the same potentially defective product is supplied as part of many amp kits "for authenticity." As long as you love the "authenticity" of having unexpected noises show up in your build or repair.

True that! But I think the "grey fiberboard" may actually have been grey (gray?). I've had a couple of old amps with truly gray fiberboard, no heavy black pigment, that demonstrated conductivity. All I can say is that paper is a bad material for circuit boards. The more carbon you add the worse the problem gets, for sure. But I've been bitching about paper boards here for over a decade for a reason. I had two Traynor amps with the brownish gray fiberboard display some conductivity with probes pressed right into the board material. And I've seen this happen in moderate humidity. The paper can absorb contaminates from heavy solder work. Like rewires, repeated modding or even a rebuild. MOST of the time these activities aren't a detriment. But sometimes they CAN be. Why take a chance??? I've built G10/FR4 boards for three Fender amps (out of maybe eight I've serviced) and one Traynor already. Though I still read things on line about the mojo of amps in original condition I don't think there's any mojo in the paper board. Mojotone and others should stop selling them in kits and anyone building an amp should be made aware of the perils. Sometimes it seems like the black, paper board is as popular as ever. I really don't understand how this can happen this in the "information age". It's not hard to find bad reports about the black tinted, paper fiber product. used for amplifier circuits

[Enzo]

I have done the research on this. both grey and gray are OK. In the USA gray is more common, and across the pond grey is more common.

I myself try to use gray for the color and Grey as a proper name. But that is just me. The only reason I do that is I like Earl Grey tea.

[DrGonz78]

And I had a 1st grade teacher named Mrs Gray. So I somehow associate grey as the color in my case.

edit: and now looking at both words they now both look wrong. Roads… row-ads

[Chuck H]

Though commonly considered a germanic language english is a mish mash of gemanic and latin language families with a smattering of a few dead language families thrown in and a lot of borrowed words that have undergone the normal evolutionary morphology into a different pronunciation. I've read that it's one of the most complicated languages to learn because it breaks it's own grammatic rules all the time. Tenses, verb or noun follows or carries and pronunciation of vowels in context are all over the map. Consider:

good
fool
door

All a single consonant with the "oo" vowel sound followed by a single consonant. And all pronounced with a different vowel sound.

Or that the present tense and past tense for "reading" is the same damn spelling pronounced differently? (read/read)

At least with grey vs. gray they can both be comprehensively pronounced the same phonetically. I like "gray" because, for no reason I can pinpoint to an event in my life, it just looks right to me.

Recalling a prior subject from another thread, my brother was recently on the gulf coast and there were "crayfish" burrows on the lawn at the house where he was. Coming from the west coast he called them "crawdads". This was a spectacle for the locals who call them "crawfish" that pegged him as an outsider. With one guy looking over at his buddy and saying "Djoo you hear what he called 'em?"

[Leo_Gnardo]

Though I still read things on line about the mojo of amps in original condition I don't think there's any mojo in the paper board. Mojotone and others should stop selling them in kits

Hear hear! There there! Where where? IIRC Randall complained to Mojo a couple years ago and they refunded him the "value" of the black fiberboard in his Deluxe Reverb kit. $14. Wowsers... Doesn't go much of a way towards covering the cost of correcting the amp.

If Mojo, or other kit suppliers, had any brains they would offer as an option "upgrade" turret or eyelet board made of proper material. For a profitable upcharge of course. They charge plenty for those kits as it is.

Sometimes it seems like the black, paper board is as popular as ever.

Guaranteed income for us repair guys & gals far into the future. Yippee!

[Helmholtz]

My trusted online dictionary says "gray": American English (AE), "grey": British English (BE).

https://dict.leo.org/german-english/grau

[Mick Bailey]

Though commonly considered a germanic language english is a mish mash of gemanic and latin language families with a smattering of a few dead language families thrown in.......

For around 300 years French was the official language of England as a result of the Norman conquest. So we still have a lot of French words, or ones that have been mildly Anglicised. There's a French language course that makes use of this and one selling point is that we already know more than 2,000 French words - courage, institution, alliance, garage etc. I guess if one looks at the etymology a lot of these are of Latin or Greek origin.