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previous: t c I've heard he made a few crappy amp... -- 6/19/2000 1:33 PM

Re: kendrick crackle noise? No ideas at all?

6/19/2000 8:37 PM
Peter S	Re: kendrick crackle noise? No ideas at all? JEEEZ! That's incredible! How can somebody produce garbage that could potentially kill somebody! This past Saturday night, I got a call from one of the local shops I do sub repairs for. He said this guy had this old Guild amp that had been rebuilt and modified with an effects loop by some famous "amp GURU in the Washington D.C. area. This guy supposedly worked on Danny Gatton's gear. I figured it would be really cool so I told him to bring it over. When I opened up the amp I couldnt believe what I saw. All I can say is WORDS FAIL to describe the butcher work in this amp. Extremely poor soldering....poor lead dress.....radio shack capacitors with lead too short had extension soldered onto the leads to make it work. Carbon comps in the power supply and a mix of 1/8,1/4,1/2 and 1 watt metal oxides and carbon films used randomly throughout the amp. I found a major cause of the hum to be the fact that the amp was grouded randomly to wherever they could find a place to ground it, also the leads were crossing over each other in a random mess. I cleaned up the lead dress and moved the main filter ground to the location where the PT CT was grounded. Here's the really ugly part. This amp had a pair of Groove Tubes/Siemens EL-34's in it, but the output tube sockets were wired for 6L6GC's. It had 1watt 470ohm CC screen grid resistors and cathode biased, the tubes were idling at 120ma each. The suppressor grids werent hooked up and the cathode resistor was not solded to the tube socket pin. The power cord was not grounded even though it was a 3 wire cord. When I was fixing everything I could in the 2 hours I had to work on it, I installed a pair of 6L6GC's and fired it up. It sounded a whole lot better, the hum was gone, and now the amp was much safer to use. I told the shop owner that the amp needed to be completly rewired PROPERLY and I wasnt very comfortable with it the way it was even though it was much better than before. I dont know the name of the so called D.C. area "GURU", but this kind of butchery is very scary to me. How do these "Guru's" get a reputation for being a so called guru. I wouldnt let the guy who worked on this amp put a battery in my clock , let alone butcher an amp for me! Peter Schmitt Kimerik Amplifiers

6/19/2000 8:37 PM

Peter S

Re: kendrick crackle noise? No ideas at all?

JEEEZ! That's incredible! How can somebody produce garbage that could potentially kill somebody! This past Saturday night, I got a call from one of the local shops I do sub repairs for. He said this guy had this old Guild amp that had been rebuilt and modified with an effects loop by some famous "amp GURU in the Washington D.C. area. This guy supposedly worked on Danny Gatton's gear. I figured it would be really cool so I told him to bring it over. When I opened up the amp I couldnt believe what I saw. All I can say is WORDS FAIL to describe the butcher work in this amp. Extremely poor soldering....poor lead dress.....radio shack capacitors with lead too short had extension soldered onto the leads to make it work. Carbon comps in the power supply and a mix of 1/8,1/4,1/2 and 1 watt metal oxides and carbon films used randomly throughout the amp. I found a major cause of the hum to be the fact that the amp was grouded randomly to wherever they could find a place to ground it, also the leads were crossing over each other in a random mess. I cleaned up the lead dress and moved the main filter ground to the location where the PT CT was grounded. Here's the really ugly part. This amp had a pair of Groove Tubes/Siemens EL-34's in it, but the output tube sockets were wired for 6L6GC's. It had 1watt 470ohm CC screen grid resistors and cathode biased, the tubes were idling at 120ma each. The suppressor grids werent hooked up and the cathode resistor was not solded to the tube socket pin. The power cord was not grounded even though it was a 3 wire cord. When I was fixing everything I could in the 2 hours I had to work on it, I installed a pair of 6L6GC's and fired it up. It sounded a whole lot better, the hum was gone, and now the amp was much safer to use. I told the shop owner that the amp needed to be completly rewired PROPERLY and I wasnt very comfortable with it the way it was even though it was much better than before. I dont know the name of the so called D.C. area "GURU", but this kind of butchery is very scary to me. How do these "Guru's" get a reputation for being a so called guru. I wouldnt let the guy who worked on this amp put a battery in my clock , let alone butcher an amp for me!

Peter Schmitt
Kimerik Amplifiers