[jhundt]

I just read the 'back-page Shop Talk' article in my May 2008 Guitar Player magazine. There was Gerald Weber saying that if your power transformer had rusty laminates it would cause eddy currents which would rob power from all of your circuits.

Well I immediately had to check, so I followed his directions and measured for conductivity across the laminates on my '55 5E3 Deluxe. Well, sure enough, I must have some serious power-robbing eddy currents because my laminates were completely conductive.

Funny enough, we used that amp a few months ago for a jam session; it was turned on and in use for over 4 hours. Angelo (aka AngelStrummer) played through the amp for the whole session and thought it sounded fine.

Has anyone else ever heard of these mysterious eddy currents? Is this for real?

Gerald was a big help for me back in the 90's, but sometimes I wonder if he's freaking out about some things. He also wrote that my amps wouldn't work well in Europe because the 50-cycle current would "saturate" the transformers. He never explained what that saturation would actually do, and after 8 years here I still can't figure out what he meant.