6V6 Guitar Amp ~ Fender "Champ" mod

This is the latest of the DIY projects that has been keeping me sane.

It all started because I spotted a 6 ½ inch Eminence guitar speaker on a Parts-Express buyout and I had a few odd tubes and transformers lying about. It turned out that the transformers were not optimal and I had to buy new ones to suite the final design but it was an enjoyable process.

The aim was to build something quite small that had a few knobs on it to play with tone, overdrive, feedback etc. There were a couple of basic designs out there and I knew I wanted to model this on the Fender Champ series. After a lot of internet sleuthing, I settled on modifying the “Angela” version of the Champ . Angela Tube supply used to host a DIY design but it has long since been removed from their website, fortunately, the circuit is still quite easy to find. The stock design didn’t have feedback or overdrive, but it was fairly straight forward to modify the circuit. It also parallels the output tubes for 7-10W of single ended output instead of the 5W the original Champ put out.




I prefer to assemble chassis and builds from things I have in my parts bin. I found a nice steel pate on which to build the amp and designed the box around this

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I played around with layout and settled on the parts positon before drilling out all the holes.

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This was an early test fit to see if it would all fit and work in the configuration I had chosen ( better to find out early in the build than too late )

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Once the basics were sorted, I painted the chassis with paint I had lying about – a hammered deep red finish

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I used akasa sound damping pads inside the box

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I fitted a perforated aluminium sheet to the rear of the amp to prevent the cat or curious fingers from exploring high voltages.

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In the midst of point to point wiring

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Added a few labels to help me remember what did what

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And what the final amp will look like once it is all wired up and ready to fire up. I completely forgot to buy a fuse holder , so I will get one of these in and put it all together and test it out. Probably going to have to wait till next weekend ( or when I get a bit of down time again)

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( I had that Scotsman badge lying about and it just seemed to work – gnarly red amp with a bit of attitude )


..dB

 

Luv it, how could this possibly sound bad??

 

Nice!!

 

Just a short follow up , still not plugged in to make noise but nearing that time. I haven't had much spare time to play about but I discovered the transformer I had originally planned to use was a little light for the parallel 6V6's ( would have worked for the single I had original considered in the early development phase )

Ken Watts to the rescue with a better suited transformer and a little assembly gets me pretty close to an amp that can be tested





till next time ..dB