Post/celebrate your (clearly) home-built projects

Nicely done,and very classy
there are some great things built by some the guys here the guitar builder threads were brilliant

 

Pretty snappy homebrew builds if you ask me. Excellent!

 

My best is my MadJack 5 watt JCM800 amp:


The amp is built from the Guitar Amplifiers PCB's Plexi SE board, cascaded. The chassis is from Watt's Amplification. The original plan was to run an EL34 in it, so the transformers are way over built. I found the 6V6 was plenty loud enough! The chassis was drilled/punched by me and the amp cabinet and 1X10" speaker cabinet were handmade and covered by me. The logo was made by a forum member on another guitar forum. The current speaker is a Weber British Series 10V, a 10" V30 copy. This thing is loud and rocks!

 

The first pedal I ever built. An op-amp Big Muff that I traced from a friend's unit. The case is made of bent-up sheet metal that I salvaged from a VCR I found overgrown by grass in an empty lot. I couldn't afford a proper Hammond box, so I did the next best thing with some sheet metal snips, vise grips, and a label maker from work.



^^ My wife didn't take too kindly to the original name, so she re-dubbed it.



Still sounds as trashy as the day I built it.

 

Low powered tweed Twin (5E8-A) with:

1. An optional/switchable additional JCM800 style gain stage.

2. A tube or solid state rectifier switch.

3. A 25 watt mode (cathode biased 6L6s) or 45 watt mode (fixed bias) switch.

4. A bright switch.

5. A pre/gain control and a master volume control (other controls are Presence, Bass, and Treble).

Speaker: Jensen reissue 15” AlNiCo P15N.

Head and speaker cab: finger-joined solid pine.

 

Luckily this is far enough away that you can’t see how shoddy the work is. The “petal board” and amp “head” in the center are at roughly the limit of my carpentry abilities.

Also I got a great deal on the 2x12 standing up to the right of the homebrew “head” amp because it was missing its back panel. I consider it a small miracle that the piece of plywood I cut to size a) fits tightly and b) doesn’t rattle.

The pedals cost a shade more than the 3 amps & one cabinet pictured here, and the guitar I’m playing. So you know I’ve got my priorities in order. Which is also why I made such a deluxe board for them. That board has grown a second tier since this photo, yet somehow there’s less on it now?

 

Also... here’s a slew of my other builds:

 

Would you believe this

started out as a Champion 600!


I started by changing the speaker out for a Weber Sig 8A(&-S). A couple tone stack lift mods and finally a complete electronics conversion to 5F1 specs, less the rectifier tube. It sounded good. It sounded Tweedy, but a bit constipated, due to the tiny, MDF cab. So, I built this Pine, Tweed cab and transferred the chassis and speaker to this cab. The sound got much more open and fuller, like a Tweed Champ should.

 

my stuff is not so glamorous but functional for me

a pair of JBL 4560's

custom studio racks prototypes



40 amp 220 pack pannel for live gigs



the middle switch pannel and momentary switches for my midi guitar set up



mic stand flanges to mount 2 mic stands right on the pedal board

 

My studio console



I figured out a way to vesa mount an Imac



My midi controller station

 

My '58 Twin...



I am actually getting ready to begin building a vintage correct cabinet (complete with tweed fabric and all).... But, for now, it looks like the Frankenstein it is.

 

I kind of like this! the way it is

 

One things for sure, nobody would give it a second look when it's time to steal it!

 

Couple of the guitar amp attenuators I've built, the Coppertone and the Bohemian Rhapsodyne:

 

Both of these were kit builds. Both included cabs that were already finished in every detail.

The Allen Encore came with amazingly accurate instructions, and aside from a bad reverb tank, everything worked right from the start. It's a great Vibrolux-inspired amp.

The Revibe is a Weber kit that looked fairly easy, but became a difficult scratch build. A fantasy mash-up of 6G15 outboard reverb (easy), and 4-triode harmonic tremolo (not so easy). Some components were sub-standard, and I opted to replace them right off. There were no instructions, and the schematic and layout didn't match up. Also, neither matched up with some (very useful, deleted) designer's notes I found in an online cache. Due to my limited understanding, I waited a long time before starting the build, reading about the science and philosophy of grounding. Finally, I scrapped the existing layout, and designed it fresh, with some new holes in the chassis, more eyelets in the board, and a whole new additional sub-board.

The circuit is tricky for a few reasons. Like the straight-up 6G15, the stock design forms a big fat noisy ground loop as soon as you plug in the instrument cable between this and the amp. Also, through the build process, I've developed even more respect for Leo and other early tube audio designers. Fine tuning the tremolo portion of the circuit, with truly massive help from @clintj, involved getting my hands on a scope, and poring over Leo's design documents from his patent application.

It sounds amazing (and it's quiet).












Currently I'm in the midst of messing up my first Telecaster build. I comfort myself in the knowledge that we learn more from mistakes than from successes. I'm learning a lot.

 

Very cool.

And you're married to a saint


These photos are going in the folder I show my wife whenever she complains about my projects getting out of hand.

 

Thank you ( I think)
you can never keep a creative mind stifled,

Beautiful work on your amps!