One year ago today: August 24, 2023, the papaya smoothie.
Five years ago today: August 24, 2019, five ingredients.
Nine years ago today: August 24, 2015, quite rare, actually.
Random years ago today: August 24, 2006, the odd suicide bomber.
Four hours to get and hour’s work done, I don’t think I adequately prepared for the slowdown. Well, I did, but never thought it would happen before I was 80. At this rate I will be crawling along by 70. But I got my hands on a SATA drive for $10. That’s the drive for my last 386 computer, the one you’ve heard about. The new van sputters a bit while warming up. The Democrats have gone into a woeful funk, but worse, Trump caused them to accelerate their agenda and now every sees how thick they are pouring it on. I’ve been thinking about that tube amp design a lot. I have zero skills working with sheet metal. I can think of no reason the hardware could not be mounted on wood, except that it would no be terribly durable.
This photo shows the 1958 guitar model known as the Flying V. Let’s plug it as a millennial would. “Ten things you didn’t know about the Flying V” and “It’s not what you think” and “Number 7 will blow your mind”. Have I missed anything? Yes. Don’t for get to hit that subscribe button.
How about some history? Fender’s Radio Service was a California startup in 1938. So that finalizes one argument. All Fenders, both guitars and amps, were not designed by musicians, but by repair technicians. One prominent feature is the guitars (and basses) were not milled from a solid block, rather the neck and body were bolted together. The boost for this was that CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System), who bought out Fender in 1965, could have the guitars assembled by unskilled labor. After that date, it is difficult to follow the changes in ownership, leadership, and fines for such illegal practices as price-fixing.
The separate neck-body formula also made it easy for copycat designs to flood the market with knock-offs. Some of them from Japan were so accurate (one was the only electric guitar I ever bought new) that they really hurt the company. Remember, CBS paid millions more for the Fender brand than they did buying the New York Yankees.
Have you ever heard of Seth Lover, from Kalamazoo? You’ve heard things he designed, one was the Wide Range pickup, nor commonly known as the humbucker or humbucking. He also created the first fuzz pedal, the “Maestro” in 1961. Now that I know what is involved, he wired two magnetic coils together in opposite polarity and phase to cancel (or buck) the hum caused by 60-cycle AC power in earlier makes. Okay, what about the Flying V? Lover admits it was totally just a way to lean the guitar against a wall without it tipping over.
Meanwhile every more bad news is hitting the Democrats and they are squirming. The futile primitive tactics they are pulling leads one to believe they are out of material. They’ve resorted to fake news headlines that the convention was a huge success that has Trump “petrified” which was good for a belly-laugh. All this rings alarms over here, the loudest saying that the Democrat’s only hope to retain any power and/or not get arrested wholesale, is to block the election. We can be certain that is one of the few remaining items on their agenda.
Pic from WILMA Magazine.
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Talking with the supplier, we went over some of the tube statistics—now that we have them. In the thousands of specimens so far, only 55 have turned out to be worth more than $10 each, wholesale. That means the remainder will probably never sell without a better strategy. This is something I’m taking a very close look at. The first plan everyone comes up with is to sell the tubes as a set. You want a single 6FQ7, you must buy a set of three, and so on. Problem, it does not work. The demand seems to be a tube-by-tube basis.
The Champ (1948 – 1982) was the lowest powered Fender, at 5W, and is now issued as a remake with the tubes, but with a solid state motherboard instead of all the old wiring. You see where I’m going with this. Could the 12AX7 and the 6V6 be sold as a combination? Within minutes I was able to determine we have no 12AX7s in stock and only two 6V6, one of which is a rare brand called “Wards” with a $30 price tag. My idea is that anybody who would spend over a thousand bucks on a 5W amp would spend $150 to replace the tubes as a set. Especially if it was marketed as the way your responsible guitar aficionado cares for his gear, blah-blah. It’s a start.
Here is a picture of a 1966 model that’s asking $1,700. This amp has gone through a number production phases, originally as the “Champion: and Fender seems to re-issue a model every few years. But the tube combination has never changed. Now we know this. So let’s not sit on our haunches. Here is a list of the most in-demand Fender amps that I am about to research.
1. Fender Blues Junior IV. One of the best-selling amps of all time. ...One surprise to me is the lack of 12AX7 tubes in my inventory. In my mind’s eye, I’ve keyed in dozens of them. But the database is unblinking, so let’s find out what we do have. You quickly learn to separate the valuable rectifier tubes as sold separately from the amplifier tubes. One of the first things the alert researcher notices is that Fender is keeping a database of who buys what, and that some of the new amps have built-in unexplained circuitry. Are we having fun yet?
2. Fender '65 Deluxe Reverb. A historic classic utilized by many. ...
3. Fender Champion 40. ...
4. Fender '68 Custom Twin Reverb. ...
5. Fender Tone Master Princeton Reverb. ...
6. Fender Mustang GTX 100. ...
7. Fender Vintage Reissue LTD '59 Bassman. ...
8. Fender Mustang Micro.
The second thing to notice is all the Fender tubes are rare. And next, finding out which amps use which tubes if very tedious work. Unless I can find some chart on-line, maybe too tedious. Later, the Fender amps use tubes that are specifically rare around here. This idea, so far, is a non-starter. Fender often produced “families” of amps, like the Princeton, with many sub-models like the 5E2 and 5F2, the differences are often hard to spot. But the Princeton B1270 bears little resemblance to the others. We’re learning.
At this point I would recognize most Fender amp circuits—and know I don’t have those tubes. So let us take a peek at an antique tube radios. Wow, that one is a nightmare, but what I am actually looking for is the products that use the tubes that I have. Not so easy, there is a very incomplete cross-reference list at World Tube, but I don’t have many of those tubes anyway. I also learned that even identical replacement tubes can vary in tone enough to be noticeable.
Nor are they radio tubes. Most schematics show radio tubes to have a different numbering format. I’m suspecting I have boxes of tubes that are just not in demand any more, say color TV tubes. Those could only be sold if used for some other purpose. You’d be partially nuts to restore and television, it’s not like they have a warmer tone you’d pay for.
