Hello, steemit peoples, and welcome to my blog, eh!
In this post, I'd like to show you my little Fender practice amp that I bought last summer. I bought it for 20 dollars, the price was low because it wasn't working properly. I figured that if I couldn't fix it, I could use the cabinet to put a small home made tube amp into.
This is the amp.
Once I got it home, I tried it out. I could hear a background hiss when the amp was turned on, but I couldn't get any sound through the input jack. I noticed that the nut was missing from the input jack and that the jack was loose. I took the back off of the amp to see what I could find.
It turned out that the input jack was mounted to the circuit board. Because of the missing nut on the jack, the the jack had been twisted by someone pulling on the cord that had been plugged in, and it cracked the circuit board. I fixed the circuit board where the copper foil had been broken by the crack and then tested it. It worked, so I put it back together and scrounged up another nut for the jack so that it wouldn't be loose anymore.
After playing through it for a couple of weeks, I decided to see if I could find a way to plug a bigger speaker into the amp. The little speaker that is built into the amp is too small to have any real bass response, and not much lower midrange. The guitar ends up sounding tinny instead of full sounding. What I ended up doing was taking the back off again and installing a jack in the back panel and then wiring it into the speaker output wires from the circuit board. I put in a switched jack so that when I plug in an external speaker, it will bypass the internal speaker. That way, the amp only has to push 1 speaker at a time.
This is what the wiring looks like.
Here's the jack mounted on the back panel of the amp.
The amp sounds a lot better with a 10 inch or 12 inch speaker plugged into it. I did a video to show the differences in the sound of the amp with the internal speaker, and with an external speaker plugged in.
Here's the link to the video that I made. The video is almost 7 minutes long including the intro and outro. In case you're wondering, the guitar is an Ibanez Artcore series semi hollow body electric guitar.
The 10 inch speaker that I used is a Pyle musical instrument speaker that I put into an empty car speaker box that I had gotten last summer. It works pretty well that way. The Pyle speaker is rated at 70 watts RMS if I remember correctly. I bought 2 of them back in the 1990s.
The 12 inch speaker is a Pioneer musical instrument speaker in a home made PA speaker cabinet that I made in the 1990s. The Pioneer speaker is rated at 150 watts RMS, it's a tough speaker with a good frequency range.
Well, that's all I have for this post, I hope you found it interesting!
Thanks for stopping by and reading my blog, eh!
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