Repair particleboard grill board

[Axtman]

I have an mid 1970's Fender Twin Reverb amp that has a damaged grill board (for lack of a better word). This is the board that the grille cloth is stretched over. Do you have any idea how to repair a break? Thanks.

[mac1amps]

From the 70's? Then the baffle (it's "proper" name) is integrated into the cabinet (The earlier ones were easily removable for replacement). Is it a "clean" break? If so, re-gluing it with a good "carpenter's" wood glue & the proper use of clamps should mend the break pretty well. If it's not a clean break, it could get pretty tedious (you may even want to consider just replacing the entire cabinet). I own a 70's Deluxe Rev. cabinet that had it's baffle smashed in. Since it was once owned by a well known celebrity, I wanted to restore it. What I did was remove the existing baffle board from the cabinet by [literally] digging it's remnants from the grooves in the cabinet where it was "permanently" mounted. From there, I chose to glue in some wooden rails, exposing enough wood to install four T-Nuts, onto which I mounted a new baffle (made from a piece of nice quality plywood). I wasn't trying to replicate the original look with this one, so instead of installing grille cloth, I just painted the baffle black, and installed a metal grille in front of the [now front "loaded" ] 12". Replicating the original style baffle/grille cloth installation is very difficult (unless you are a "wiz" at wood shop skills), due to layout.

[jrfrond]

Those particle board grilles flat-out suck. I've replaced many of them with Mojo plywood replacements. Particle board is almost impossible to repair permanently, and was/is a poor choice for a baffle board. I just did a Super Reverb like this a couple of weeks ago.

You can try epoxy and see if it holds, but these boards are born to fail. Many times, I see the mounting holes just rip right out!

[Gibsonman63]

Singing to the choir

Mac1Amps is correct. It can be a little tedious. I recently restored and blackfaced a 1972 Super Reverb and ran into the same issue. Once I dug out all of the partical board, I filled in the slots and installed some mounting strips for the new baffle board as suggested. Based on my experience, I have a couple of lessons learned. First, buy your mounting screws before you cut your mounting strips to thickness. I found 2" screws and 2 1/2" screws, but now 2 1/4" screws. Second, make sure you have adequate clearance to access the nuts for the chassis strap bolts, particularly the side behind the power transformer.

Measure the baffle insert depth before you remove the old baffle so you can mock up the mounting strips and new baffle to match.

I bought my Baffle from Larry Rogers in Florida. He did a nice job and will provide "aged" grill-cloth for no extra charge.

[Bruce / Mission Amps]

Hmmm... a little nebulous there but it sounded like he might be talking about the grille cloth frame, not the baffle board.
Regardless.... if it is the grille cloth frame, I've found it is actually pretty hard to repair because it is under tension from the grille cloth material.
You'll have to release the grille cloth from the frame first and probably re-staple the material after you can fix or rebuild the frame.

The baffle board is not to hard replace if you use a saber saw to remove all but 1"-1.25" of the baffle board material on the left and right sides... and then using some good quality, well wetting, wood grade super glue to seep into the joint, use proper length screws to firmly attach what is left over into the dado cuts of the cabinet carcass.
Then just have someone make you a new baffle board with new grille cloth material and attach it to your cabinet with what amounts to "built in" vertical particle board cleats (similar in idea to what black face cabinet would have even those cleats were pine).
You attach this new baffle board from the front, like your grille cloth frame was, but use screws from the back of the cabinet, through the new "cleats" and draw the baffle board to the cleats.