So I found some vinyl for the amp

I asked around for how much it might cost to get half a yard of automotive or marine vinyl– I find that it’s REALLY PRICEY. $10 for HALF a yard? Wow. That seems a bit much. So I went to a junkyard and asked what they’d charge me for cutting the top off an old vinyl-topped car. 2 dollars and a square yard of vinyl later you get this picture:

After I cleaned it (dish soap, hot water, a general purpose scrub brush and a rag):

It came off a car kinda like this one (I think it was a few years older, I don’t really know):

Stay tuned!

Added a light– and stripped off the tolex…

Instead of a pilot light, I decided to put an LED in. It’s blue!

I took my extra 6 volt leads and put them to use. The LED although it’s huge doesn’t handle AC current very well, so I put another diode running across the leads to handle the other end of the AC, attached a 100 ohm resistor to the negative lead, and then connected my 6 volt leads. Voila! Blue light!

Also– shortly afterward– I stripped off all the ugly black tolex. Lots of the wood is painted black, and it certainly looks ugly right now.
I decided I wanted to make the amp more vintage looking– so I’m on a hunt for some white marine vinyl or automotive vinyl– looks like I can get some used stuff for free at the local upholstery place. We’ll see about that later, though…

So as I built the amp

I bought a power transformer and an output transformer from matt at www.musicalpowersupplies.com
and I got a free 6v6 from my friend Brian.

I took some pictures and asked some online forums about it– turns out it looks to be about half a century old– sometime after 1955, likely during the 1960′s.

After much homework and schoolwork interrupted my project I finally returned to it a few weeks ago…
Here’s a gut shot:

So… a year ago I decided to build an amplifier….

This was a slightly more intensive project than the Tele…

First was a lot of research… I finally found something like this at the Ceriatone website… I have since edited the image of the layout…

Then I spent a lot of time talking to a friend of mine at the local music store, Brian Patchett. He just began his own company, Eve Amplifiers.

I spent many hours reading a tutorial about how tubes worked (NEETS), and spent a lot of time looking up electronic components on ebay…

As I was beginning, I was given a Peavey Audition Plus that didn’t work. My sister-in-law had moved into an apartment and the Peavey was tucked in a corner of a small closet. The power transformer was hanging by it’s wires– and I was pretty sure it was dead, but I asked Brian about it anyway. He said the power transformer was probably shot. I fiddled with it– got some intermittent sounds out of it, but decided that the PC board inside was cracked somewhere and not easily pinpointed. So I gutted the chassis and kept a few parts from the original amp.

I started looking for a way to mount my components inside the chassis finding that the most inexpensive way to go was a perfboard– like you might find at Radioshack… I have another local electronics store that keeps a lot weirder things in stock, so I went there.

After a few weeks, school got tough so I had to put it aside– but I had mounted most of my electronic components to the perfboard, drilled holes for the tubes in the chassis, and done just a little wiring.

I bought a power transformer and an output transformer from matt at www.musicalpowersupplies.com
and I got a free 6v6 from my friend Brian.

I took some pictures and asked some online forums about it– turns out it looks to be about half a century old– sometime after 1955, likely during the 1960′s.

After much homework and schoolwork interrupted my project I finally returned to it a few weeks ago…
Here’s a gut shot:

This is a shot of the inside of the chassis, you can see the three sockets for the tubes and the perf board.

The red knob at one end is the impedance switch for the speaker– figured that I’d put that inside at first– not sure that I’ll leave it there, though…

You can’t see them (they’re hidden by the chassis) but there are two power resistors in the rectifier circuit (they smooth out a little bit of the ripple in the power supply and may add a bit of sag to the rectifier’s response– that one’s doubtful though…)

Since I took this picture– a couple of things have changed. The black nub you see at the top right has moved down to the bottom left, moving my AC away from my signal wires and placing my fuse holder (the black nub) on the back of the chassis instead of the front. I have also been shortening wires– to make the signal path as short as possible with as little interference from extra wiring as possible as well.

Bridge placement on the Tele

This is me on halloween, (I was supposed to be Casey Jones, from the ninja turtles). I was working on the guitar again, installing The tuners that you can see on the headstock, and the bridge.

I bought a lefty bridge, because I wanted a reverse angle on the bridge pickup, which on a Tele, sticks up through the bridge. I had to search pretty diligently to find one, and then I had to route the pickup cavity out so that the pickup would fit under the bridge tilted the right way.

I looked up Telecaster builds with photos and explanations to figurer out how to place the bridge. Finding the right Scale length wasn’t too hard. I knew it was 25.5″ from the nut, (12.75″ from the 12th fret), and the route already in the body of the guitar was a decent guide. Lining the bridge up so that the strings ran straight was harder.

I actually strung the low and high strings through their slots and used their lines in comparison to the edge of the neck. It took a bit of finagling, but once I had it, I marked the body through the holes in the bridge, and proceeded to drill guide holes with a 3/32 drill bit.

This actually failed, as I later took the bridge up, plugged the holes and moved the bridge about an 1/8″ further down the body, in order for the guitar to intonate correctly.

Neck Pocket on my Tele build

I put the neck on, but had trouble lining up the holes drilled in the base of the neck with the neck pocket holes on the guitar. As things continued it became clear I really needed to correct this. To fix it, I bought a dowel rod from Home Depot a little smaller than the holes, and I semi plugged the holes in the neck, thinking this would be easier than redrilling the holes in the body.

After waiting for the glue to dry for about 40 minutes, I reassembled it, and it’s felt pretty solid ever since. I wondered if I would need to shim the neck, but it seems like a nice fit.

Telecaster Build

So I decided to build a tele clone partscaster. Don’t know what that is? Google it. You’ll figure it out.

So here we have the neck, which I stained. Since then I believe I’ve found that the neck is likely from a Kramer guitar.

Afterwards, I finished it with a spray-on clearcoat, but I plant to refinish it later with a brush on polyurethane.