greetings

[stingray_65]

My son and I are currently putting together a Fender Telecaster from parts.

I'm NOT a musician, but my son is. I am however pretty knowledgeable electronically. I am also a very capable sheet metal fabricator and have good wood working skills.

I've decided I want to build a low wattage tube amp to go with this guitar build.

I like the simplicity of the 5F1 champ, however the 5E3 doesn’t look beyond my means to build either.

I do not wish to build a total reproduction period correct amp.

I would like to build either project as a separate head and bin.

I would also like to have some basic equalizing tone circuits i.e. bass mid treble.

What I need now is some educated suggestions so that I have a better direction to my final goal.

Thanks

[tubeswell]

Take a look at the Fender Amp Field Guide here http://64.224.225.85/ffg/

I'd say try any of the (mid 50s) tweed era circuits that use readily obtainable valves e.g.; champ, princeton, deluxe, bassman. IMHO these are proven designs and there is alot of info available on the net

[stingray_65]

After talking more with my son and a few experienced players, the Deluxe (5E3), with its bright channel and higher output is what he is looking for.

I will still build this as a seperate head and speaker bin.

The circuit schematic I have shows a single tone pot.

Is there an easy mod for making a simple bass, mid, treble, EQ ?

is this really nescassary?

[stingray_65]

Here is the circuit diagram I am working with.

There are notes and mods I want to make in red.

Is this a viable schematic?

Because this will be an amp head without a speaker in the cabinet I wanted to add a dummy load on a N.C. switched jack so that when not plugged in the OT goes through the load. ( 4 or 8 ohms to match the speaker impedance)

Is this nescassary? (I could see my son unplugging the speaker bin while playing)

Are the tapers correct on the volume (audio) and tone (linear)?

Are my tube pins correct?

On the 120vac supply side:

Do I want to add the modern polarized ground plug?

Do I want to eliminate the ground switch? or wire directly to the line (hot) side?

On the secondary side of the power transformer, would I still run the two taps to ground when I convert to a modern polarized plug with ground?

[tubeswell]

Hi Stingray65

Everything looks okay except for the heaters. For a parallel heater connection with a 6.3V Ct winding, pre-amp pins 4 and 5 are wired together on one side and pin 9 is the other side. Your other pins are alright. Remove the deathcap and put in a mains ground like you show, and move the fuse to the live side of the active mains wire. Dummy load is a good idea for a head

I'd use an audio pot on the tone control.

The Hoffman layout diag shows how to hook them up

[stingray_65]

Got it!

i see what you mean with the pin 9 ctr tap.

i found it in a different schematic wired as you mentioned.

will switch the tone pot to log taper as per your suggestion.

Next step:

determine what speaker and enclosure for the lower bin

then build me a chassis to apropritly fit ( i like lots of room in electronic projects)

[tubeswell]

Don't make the chassis too big. Reason is that I prefer to keep signal wires as short as possible so that they don't pick up stray EMI (which can happen easily in a tube amp where the voltages on the power supply wires are high).

I am building a 5E3 variant at the moment - chassis is 40cm wide, 7.5cm deep and 11cm high. It is about right