Water Damaged Vintage SFTR Head: $1100 -- Is this CL Seller Smoking Crack?!?

[bob p]

There is a picture on the CL ad of the date stamp inside the chassis. Doesn't look like very much rust. Might of only been under water for a couple of hours.

Could be. But I remember that flood in 2008 lasting the better part of a week. The chassis itself doesn't show much rust, but that's not where I'd be looking for damage. I think the transformer lams and the fiberboard and the reverb springs would be the first places to show water damage. I asked for photos of those but never received them.

[Leo_Gnardo]

Doing the math a Fender Twin Reverb Cab is ~22" high. The subject amp was "...sitting in about 3 feet of water."
Hmm...?

So the seller is explaining this because...?
I guess it is his explanation about why the asking price is so low.

It's kind of ambiguous, was the amp in a 3 foot deep pool of water or was the top of the amp 3 feet below the surface of the water? Submerged, any way you look at it.

Maybe it was Flint Michigan water that etched all the rust off it.

And if it was Nashville the seller could claim it was baptized, not just soaked.

I told this story before here: a record producer's home was in a springtime ice dam flood, he saw his tweed Deluxe floating in 4 feet of water in the livingroom. I told him just let it slowly bake on a cast iron radiator for a couple months. Checked it out, all was OK, then he called me and said it sounded better than ever! There's your magic formula for sonic improvement, soak your gem in ice water, way better & cheaper than cryo-treatment with liquid nitrogen.

[bob p]

Baking on a radiator -- I'll have to remember that trick. Nice!

[Randall]

yes but, "The "Fender" Logo, reverb tank, amp handle, mounting hardware and screws are all original."

[Justin Thomas]

By extension, a coffee can full of concrete with a chain attached (grandpa's boat anchor) should sound as good as the finest Marshall 2204 around...
Oh, wait - I forgot about Fender's Amp Can a few years back. It sounded Friggin AMAZING!

Justin

[Steve A.]

In the original post here the seller said he "acquired" the amp sitting in 3 feet of water and that it had been sitting around his house since then for about 10 years. I suspect that he got the amp free from a friend, or for a song from a stranger. So the money he invested in "restoring" the amp might have been a good investment for him, especially if he wanted to keep the weight down for health reasons. But it still doesn't make the amp worth much more than $650... and that is assuming that the amp tech gave it a, er, clean bill of health.

Steve Ahola

[Richard]

I played through an SRO Coffee can in a tweed Fender, only a few minutes but it was pretty sweet. Is there any currently produced speaker that sounds similar?

[bob p]

I think you're being pretty generous in your appraisal, Steve. Considering that a complete TR with speakers that's never been waterlogged can easily be had for $650, I think that an amp that's missing speakers and the cab can't be close to worth that much. Add on the fact that it's got indeterminate water damage and I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole. Anohter thing to consider is that GC was selling a Dual Showman Reverb head in excellent condition for $650 and it took weeks to move. Some would have to be crazy to pay as much for that boat anchor as they'd pay for a legitimate fender head.

I don't know of anything that sounds as good as the SROs, but then I've always been an EVM-12L/15L kind of guy. The SRO is the only speaker that I think sounds better.

[Richard]

I have an EVM-12L, it's excellent but I could use a little more sparkle.

[52 Bill]

One thing that I will add here is that the smaller Fender amps will float upside down. The weight of the chassis sinks under the water and the wooden cabinet rises to the top.

Please don't ask me why I know this.

[Justin Thomas]

Please don't ask me why I know this.

I'm going to go cry now... remind me to weight all my small combos at the bottom for this reason...

Justin

[Leo_Gnardo]

I have an EVM-12L, it's excellent but I could use a little more sparkle.

If you have a recone facility nearby - you need not entirely recone your EV just have them replace the dust dome with an aluminum one and you'll get some of that old JBL "zing". I'll bet you can get it done for less than $50.

I've needed to go the other direction and had JBL's re domed with paper, works great!

[bob p]

And I thought Leo was joking about a Tweed Deluxe floating across the room...

[loudthud]

If you have a recone facility nearby - you need not entirely recone your EV just have them replace the dust dome with an aluminum one and you'll get some of that old JBL "zing". I'll bet you can get it done for less than $50.

I've needed to go the other direction and had JBL's re domed with paper, works great!

There was a thread on TalkBass where a guy put aluminum domes on Eminence Neo 15's and though they sounded like old JBLs.

[Leo_Gnardo]

There was a thread on TalkBass where a guy put aluminum domes on Eminence Neo 15's and though they sounded like old JBLs.

I'm sure it would work on most any speaker. That aluminum dome acts as a sort of built-in tweeter, adding an obvious peak across 2K-7KHz especially if you're listening on-axis with the speaker. By accident I found Altec's aluminum-dome 12 inch 417 speakers sound terrific for full range hi fi. All you're missing is the top octave. At my age that's gone missing anyway, so what.