I might've just committed to buying an amp...

aon

aon

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So for the past few months I've been mulling over the thought of building something AC15'ish.

Today I was casually browsing Facebook and what do I see on the marketplace? An "AC15" head made by a local amp builder for less than what it'd cost me to get decent parts to build one (unless I were to make the cab and chassis from scratch...)

Ok, it's not exactly what I had in mind as it's a single 12AX7 channel with tremolo and reverb whereas I was thinking of having an EF86 channel and a 12AX7 channel without trem or reverb... But by ditching the effects it shouldn't be too hard to mod this to have a second channel. It's also SS rectified instead of tube but honestly I'm not sure if that even matters that much...

But unless something weird happens I should have it in a few days. I'll post pics once it arrives.
 
67plexi said:
You should build this EF86 amp.
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I did dive pretty deep into the rabbit hole of AC 15-inspired schematics a while ago. I came up with something myself, then I realized that the Tube-Town kits are pretty close to what I want, and I had just about settled on what I'm going to get from there when I saw this.

I'll play around with it a bit as it is, but I'd really like to have two channels, the second one with a "traditional" master vol so that I can have balanced volume for cleans and OD. Luckily this is point-to-point and the shop where it was originally built has pretty affordable hourly rates. Maybe I'll ask him for a quote so I can avoid doing anything myself :D

So currently it has 4 x 12AX7. I guess one for preamp gain stages, one for tremolo, one for reverb, one for PI. Completely dropping the effects would leave 3x12AX7 for preamps, replace one of them with an EF86, still got 2x12AX7 for the second channel. I'm thinking JCM800 2203 preamp for the second channel maybe? Would be different enough.
 
Well this thing is just too awesome to do any significant mods. Getting a decent clean still needs some learning and tweaking (I believe the tone stack is a baxandall) but the overdrive, especially with a Strat, is just Rory on tap ;)

IMG_20210421_180137.jpg

As you can see I had some helping hands during the intial inspection.

IMG_20210421_175642.jpg

What it needs is a matching 1x12" cab.

IMG_20210421_183932.jpg
 
aon said:
Getting a decent clean still needs some learning and tweaking (I believe the tone stack is a baxandall) but the overdrive, especially with a Strat, is just Rory on tap ;)
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You got to love that!
 
SG John said:
You got to love that!
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Yeah. I've also discovered that it seems to work very well with a Tube Screamer. Never understood them before but with this, if i try to get a good overdrive sound from the amp, then dial the gain back, take off some treble and add a bit of bass to have a nice clean sound, the TS seems to be able to slam it back to a very similar overdrive that I started with.
 
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