Re: 1979 Fender Twin (very slow) restoration
Posted: Sat Dec 31, 2022 9:27 pm
Starting down the long restoration road.
Pulled the chassis out of the amp. Unbelievable amount of nicotine/smoke residue. This thing has spent 30 years in very smokey bars. I've cleaned the chassis with grease cutting kitchen cleaner, isopropyl alcohol, xylene, and grease cutting kitchen cleaner again. Still stained and smells. Only time plus the heat when I get back to Australia will remove it. Honestly, if it wasn't a vintage twin I would have just stopped and sold it "for restoration" by now.
- Replaced the damaged Standby switch.
- Replaced the missing Power switch.
- Replaced the damaged fuse holder.
- Replaced the old rubber insulated power cord.
- I broke the push-pull master volume pot when I was dismantling the amp. Fixed that.
- Replaced all the electrolytic capacitors.
I need to clean and lube all the pots, switches and connectors, re-tension the tube socket connectors, dig my bias meter out of storage, then power the beast up.
The fuse was blown and the previous owner had tried to fix it by wrapping aluminium foil around the blown fuse. I tested the power transformer and it is drawing only 300mA with no tubes inserted, so it isn't shorted (that was a possibility). One of the power tubes has pieces of the internal structure rattling around inside the tube, so likely the blown fuse is simply because of a failed power tube.
.
.
Lots of lovely (if smelly) point-to-point goodness - showing locations of replaced LV caps.
. .
.
New HV caps:
. .
.
43 year old electrolytic capacitors - most of them starting to get a little puffy:
. .
Pulled the chassis out of the amp. Unbelievable amount of nicotine/smoke residue. This thing has spent 30 years in very smokey bars. I've cleaned the chassis with grease cutting kitchen cleaner, isopropyl alcohol, xylene, and grease cutting kitchen cleaner again. Still stained and smells. Only time plus the heat when I get back to Australia will remove it. Honestly, if it wasn't a vintage twin I would have just stopped and sold it "for restoration" by now.
- Replaced the damaged Standby switch.
- Replaced the missing Power switch.
- Replaced the damaged fuse holder.
- Replaced the old rubber insulated power cord.
- I broke the push-pull master volume pot when I was dismantling the amp. Fixed that.
- Replaced all the electrolytic capacitors.
I need to clean and lube all the pots, switches and connectors, re-tension the tube socket connectors, dig my bias meter out of storage, then power the beast up.
The fuse was blown and the previous owner had tried to fix it by wrapping aluminium foil around the blown fuse. I tested the power transformer and it is drawing only 300mA with no tubes inserted, so it isn't shorted (that was a possibility). One of the power tubes has pieces of the internal structure rattling around inside the tube, so likely the blown fuse is simply because of a failed power tube.
.
.
Lots of lovely (if smelly) point-to-point goodness - showing locations of replaced LV caps.
. .
.
New HV caps:
. .
.
43 year old electrolytic capacitors - most of them starting to get a little puffy:
. .