These old 50's and 60's boxes are speaking to me and telling me to make tweed amps...

[mort]

.. out of them.


They are very convincing in this manner.

[zbones]

Those are totally awesome

[mort]

Work on the first one has begun. This will actually be my 7 year old's first guitar amplifier. He recently got a mini-Strat so he needs an amp

Anyway, I had this chassis made up to fit. The box is pretty small so it's gonna be a pretty tight layout. The speaker you see is just for reference. A nice little 6" Weber alnico is on its way. But this is how it will lay out, and the tube sockets will be sticking out toward the speaker. 5F2-A is the circuit I chose but it will be diode rectified as the tiny little PT doesn't have 5V taps.




The volume and tone knobs and jewel lamp will stick through the grill cloth on the side of the amp.... here:




And for an input jack it's going to get a Fender Strat style recessed jack plate installed somewhere on the cabinet (I'm proud of that idea )


And then the speaker will be mounted into a hole that gets cut out of the front. I'll cut the hole, trim the edge with some brown "C" shaped trim to cover the cut, and then have wheat grill cloth behind the hole with the speaker mounted behind the cloth. I'm going to try to "age" the grill cloth a little to make it look as natural to the cab as possible.

Here's the front where the speaker hole will be. It will stand on the little metal feet that you see:

[gui_tarzan]

You know what's cooler than the boxes? The fact that he can say "my dad made this for me!"

[g1]

Judging by this and what you posted here: http://music-electronics-forum.com/t28461-3/#post347002 , I'd say it's definitely time to update your signature .

Nice work, and unique to boot!

[mort]

Thanks! I even made a website recently... check out my slogan

mortatone.com

It's all for fun. And I always let people know that I'm mainly an educated assembler, not any sort of amp guru or wizard tech. And I'll still be asking stupid questions

[The Dude]

Love the slogan. Can't wait to see the finished product.

"Building Hand Made Guitar Amplifiers Since at Least Yesterday"

[Enzo]

You know what's cooler than the boxes? The fact that he can say "my dad made this for me!"

Yes, indeed this.

[mort]

A little has been accomplished on my boy's amp. He got to pull the handle on the drill press while making the eyelet board. That's HUGE fun for a 7 year old

It's gonna get a nice straight piece of grill cloth over the speaker. And I was right proud of my idea to use a strat jack plate as the amp input.

[bob p]

I love those old early 1960s phonographs. My neighbor has one in baby blue tolex that is like-new -- I've been trying to pry out of his hands for years... no luck so far...

I really like the Strat jack.

On a similar note, I once built an amp out of an old Bell and Howell 16mm projector that had a small single-ended 6V6 amp inside, and a removable alnico speaker with a long cord that you were supposed to locate under the movie screen when showing a movie. Instead of gutting it, I left the innards intact, so the main reel would spin when it was powered on. It sounded like a tweed champ. I loved playing through that thing as the reel turned. It's probably the coolest thing I'd ever built. Too bad that I let it go...

[Bill Moore]

That looks great, Mort, your boy is a lucky kid! Nice touch with the jack.
I think we owned a record player like that when my wife and I were first married.

[Enzo]

Cool, I like it.

[mort]

Spent some of the evening putting the chassis together. This is one teeny chassis. Just need to wire in the input and power cord and it will be ready for power up.

Since I'm only using one input instead of two, am I correct in assuming I would simply run the tip to a 68K input resistor and the sleeve to ground and forget about the 1M resistor on the jack?

[Justin Thomas]

Nice work, mort!

I'm at a summer school right now; one of the guitar players built his pedalboard into an old green plasticky suitcase thing... Thought that was pretty cool, too. I love repurposing wacky old stuff!

Justin

[mort]

For anyone still interested, here is the finished project and a clip. I'd apologize for the sloppy playing but that's the way I like it.

https://soundcloud.com/mortatone/princeton-clip-2