1959 Fender Bassman 5F6-A Power output??'s

7/6/2004 6:53 AM

Paul Bamberg

1959 Fender Bassman 5F6-A Power output??'s Gentlemen;   I have the above amp on my workbench and it is putting out only 25 watts of undistorted output into a 2 ohm resistive load. What is the typical undistorted output you all see???   1. The amp is all orginal, except for 1 screen resistor and the .02 cap connected between the treble and bass controls in the control stack (someone changed it to .1).   2. The amp at idle has 465 volts on the 5881 plates, under power sags to 429. The idle ripple at the Output xformer center tap is 3VAC at idle, increases to 7VAC at full power.     The amp has a microphonic 12AY7 tube and the amp makes random one shot noises when idling (sounds like psssh pssh).     This thing could stand new tubes, as well as new CAPS this thing is 45 yrs old. The owner has asked that I look it over and clean the controls. As far as Im concerned a re-cap and new tubes are in order, but the owner must make that call. Again my ??s are what power output would you all expect and what would be a good idle current for the power tubes.   Sincerely   Paul Bamberg