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Dan, I have a number of old amps, and find them to be like old cars: they have
wonderful
character and are great fun when they work, but they take a great deal of care
and
maintanance and use to stay healthy. Reliability isn't their strength and they
nickel, dime
and dollar you to death. So, you really have to decide, is this old amp worth
investing
considerable money in? If so, send it off to a really good amp rebuilder (I use
Lord Valve/
NBS Electronics in Denver, a very well-regarded establishment). You need good
diagnostics and advice, not the patch-work repair your repair shop did on you.
Their first
error was fixing a blown fuse but not fixing the problem that is causing blown
fuses.
Find a repair person who respects vintage equipment and repairs and replaces
parts
judiciously, with the goal of making the amp live for many more years.
That said, letting an amp sit for years causes electronic parts to atrophy.
Bringing it up to
life at full power, rather than slowly using a Variac, was a mistake. It makes
me cringe
whenever I read an eBay listing that says, "I found this old amp that had been
in my Dad's
attic for 30 years; I powered it up..." About half the time, that little
experiment leads to
serious damage.
If you get it rebuilt, be sure to play it every month for a few hours.
Gavin
--- In , Dan Bartley <bigtwangguy@y...> wrote:
> I just got my '63 Tremolux head back from the repair shop. I had them change
all the
tubes, resistor, and re-biased. They also had to put a new fuse in as the old
one was
blown. Now, I haven't used this amp in years and was looking forward to hearing
the old
gal again, but when I turned it on it made this crackling noise and blew the
fuse within one
minute. You could really smell that it had heated up alot.
> A long time ago I had my wife plug in her Yamaha combo organ to the Tremolux,
and
after about an hour there was smoke comming out of the input jacks. The
transformer was
replaced but as I now recall it kept blowing fuses after that. Any suggestions?
> Dan
>
>
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