First built - 5F1 - works right away!

I have some experience modding, repairing and maintaining tube amps, but never built one form scratch. So the COVID lockdown was the perfect excuse!

I had a 4 ohm Jensen P10R and some IKEA-shelves laying around, so I ordered a kit (chassis only) from a Dutch electronics shop (https://www.jukebox-revival.nl/) and off we go!

The built was simple enough, but man, a 5F1 chassis is cramped! The cab is simple: just glued with dowels and some reinforment slats on the inside. I don't have the tools or the space the make finger joints or dove tails.

I did change one thing: the elco of the preamp (the last or first one, depending how you look at it) was grounded only with a wire to the ground lug of the input jacks, and thus only through the mechanical connection of the jack to the chassis (the other two elco's were grounded with a seperate wire with a lug on one of the PT-bolts). This seemed a bit strange to me: if the jack comes loose, the elco is grounded thru the guitar strings and the player! Not a good thing imho, so I connected that elco also to ground of the other two elco's. While this may result in a ground loop in theory, the amp is very quiet and only with volume past 75% some hiss and the tiniest hum is audible.

And it worked right away on the first start up!

I am very surprised by this little 5 watter! It sounds great and has a lot more volume and clean headroon than I expected. Great for practise at home, but I can see myself doing the occasional coffee-house gig with it!

The finished product:


My DIY ES-330/Casino sounds simply superb through it!


Unfinished cab:


Some gut-shots:

 

Thanks!

 

In spite of the 10" speaker the cab almost has the exact same dimensions as that of the 8" Champ! It's only a little deeper at the bottom, creating a more angled baffle, which makes the speaker tilt back a little more and points the speaker magnet down a little, so it's not in the way of the tubes or trafo's.

With my Boss FRV-1 it sounds amazing!