It’s the 124th installment of the Truth About Vintage Amps with Skip Simmons: Conductive paints, speaker impedance mismatches, pizza hacks and lots of dad jokes!
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Some of the topics discussed this week:
:57 Skip works on a Jim Kelley Amp
6:30 Rancho Gordo beans, redux
7:49 Converting a SF Champ to the Princeton schematic and recommended plate voltages; Skip makes a tweed Harvard out of a Champ; pilot light washers from Daniel Petrzelka (Instagram: @dpetrzelka)
13:39 The 1970s Whole Earth Catalogs are now online (link)
15:21 What makes a great A/B box?
17:24 A ’55 Tweed Bassman with a replaced output transformer and 7025s; Skip finishes the Tweed Deluxe overhaul
25:41 Impedance mismatches in 1950s Fender amps, using the external speaker output
31:26 Did David Lindley play on the Rockford Files theme song? Toots Thielemans
33:43 Eminence, Kentucky and Colonel Sanders
35:07 Can anything other than tubes be microphonic; the one-wire mod to have the reverb and tremolo on both channels on a Fender
37:12 Fuse-eating rectifier tubes on a Victoria Bandmaster clone; 5U4 vs GZ34 tubes
39:38 Converting a ’50s Philco record player console for guitar use; Commander Cody; the Louvin Brothers’ ‘Satan Is Real’
43:26 Bringing up an old amp on a Variac
48:49 Experiments with conductive paints
52:36 Very loud noise floor in a low-wattage amp
56:21 A tube amp setup to compliment the Fender Tonemaster Pro
1:00:00 Biasing an old record player amp
Hosted by amp tech Skip Simmons and co-hosted/produced by Jason Verlinde of the Fretboard Journal.
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Above pic: Listener Wes’ awesome-looking Tempo guitar amp, not mentioned this week but worthy of a share.