Yet another power supply question (old tweed type powersupply)

[thehoj]

So I'm working on this older amp I got ahold of recently, and I'm worried the B+ I'm getting out of it is too high now for the OT I'm running.

The amp itself is a very basic 6L6 cathode biased type amp. I'm not too concerned about the B+ I'm getting on the preamp tubes or power tubes, but the OT I have is some sort of fairly small hammond that has no labelling on it.. It's about 50 years old, and I'm sure at that point in time VAC from the outlet was a bit lower than I'm getting now.

It's a Hammond 273BX Power tranny, and I'm using a 5u4gb rectifier, so after the AC is rectified I'm getting about 440VDC. With the power supply I put together this 440VDC connects to the OT right off the first filter cap, and I'm slightly worried that it's too much. The OT gets pretty hot after I run it for a while. Not too hot to touch, so maybe it's not an issue, but I was thinking about adding an extra section to the power supply with another 10K power resistor to drop some more B+ before it gets to the OT.

Something like this (added filtering and 10K resistor in red circle):
http://home.westman.wave.ca/~vwtweak...son5c8rev2.jpg

Does this make sense? Would it be a bad idea to do this?

To me it seems like a fine idea, but I just wanted to make sure, as I always seem to see the OT connected right at the first filter cap.

[Wilder Amplification]

Not needed. 440VDC is perfect for 6L6s. Plus Fender typically used OTs with a higher than required primary impedance for the voltage they ran so it's a non-issue.

[thehoj]

It's not actually a Fender. It's a Johnson prototype of some sort. Built in the 50's or 60's by a local electronics shop. If I could find out some info on the OT I'd feel better, but there is not a single model number on it.
The only reason I got worried about this is that once I wired it up and played around with it for a while, I cranked it right up and played on it pretty much dimed for about 5 minutes and it started fizzling out.
The only thing that seemed a bit odd was that the OT was quite hot. After I let the amp cool down for an hour or so it started working fine again.

I thought maybe it was one of the preamp tubes, but I wouldn't have thought that it would work fine again after cooling down.
Is it possible that one of the tubes is in fact bad?

If I play the amp quieter it runs fine for much longer.

[Wilder Amplification]

When running a tube amp cranked you're pulling a lot of current so things will get hot. It's just nature of the beast.

As long as your tubes aren't red plating at full crank you're fine.

[thehoj]

So, if the OT as used in this amp originally was likely seeing around 410, 440 is likely fine also?..

The fizzling out of the signal was likely caused by a preamp tube do you think?
It was sort of like, I'd hit the strings and the output would be there but then quickly fizzle out.

[Wilder Amplification]

Yes 440 is fine. The OT primary isn't seeing the full supply voltage except at the very peak swing of the signal and even then it's not seeing quite the full supply voltage (the full primary actually sees close to double the B+ at full swing but each 1/2 of the primary sees almost the full B+ at full swing).

At idle each 1/2 of the primary is only seeing the amount of voltage being dropped by its DC resistance between the plate and the B+/center tap.

The fizzling out could be anything to be honest...including a tube.