# Finished an 18watter!



## HamishR (Oct 13, 2022)

I thought this would have been finished earlier this week but no... I had cut a beautiful baffle for it, pained it, put grill cloth and piping on it - then found the speaker wouldn't clear the amp! D'oh!

So: cut another baffle, glue and screw the spacers for the grill, paint matt black, leave overnight, add grill cloth and piping and voila - done. It's all quite cozy inside but nothing touches anything it shouldn't. The cab is solid pine finger-jointed like a tweed cab and I think it has really helped remove the boxiness that these amps can suffer from sometimes. It's also quite a bit lighter in weight which always a bonus. Speaker is a Celestion G12H Creamback - a favourite of mine. Really proud of the extremely low noise floor.





Damn - I must wipe those dusty fingermarks off it!


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## SillyOctpuss (Oct 13, 2022)

HamishR said:


> I thought this would have been finished earlier this week but no... I had cut a beautiful baffle for it, pained it, put grill cloth and piping on it - then found the speaker wouldn't clear the amp! D'oh!
> 
> So: cut another baffle, glue and screw the spacers for the grill, paint matt black, leave overnight, add grill cloth and piping and voila - done. It's all quite cozy inside but nothing touches anything it shouldn't. The cab is solid pine finger-jointed like a tweed cab and I think it has really helped remove the boxiness that these amps can suffer from sometimes. It's also quite a bit lighter in weight which always a bonus. Speaker is a Celestion G12H Creamback - a favourite of mine. Really proud of the extremely low noise floor.
> 
> ...



Damn I want one or your amps so badly.  Or better yet two.  An 18 watt like this and a matchless lightning style to run wet dry.  That would be dope.


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## HamishR (Oct 13, 2022)

Wow! Thanks Mr Octopus!  That is a huge compliment!  I have a few friends here who seem quite happy to buy my amps from me whenever I want to sell them too!   It makes me incredibly happy to see and hear them being used. A good friend of mine plays in a band which plays raucous covers of Beatles tunes - they are seriously good, too - and they use three of my amps. I feel like a proud parent.

I always like to encourage people to build their own. I forget that I've been doing this for twenty years now, but then I am a slow learner. There is so much more info about now - when I started there wasn't the same amount of info, parts, transformers, guidance... It's a lot to learn but I have loved every minute of it.


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## szukalski (Oct 13, 2022)

I can only echo the other comment. I’d love to commission you to build a head if it wouldn’t lead to divorce.

It looks so simple in pics, I start thinking of building my own but my experience with pedals tells me it’s not so easy..


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## SillyOctpuss (Oct 13, 2022)

szukalski said:


> I can only echo the other comment. I’d love to commission you to build a head if it wouldn’t lead to divorce.
> 
> It looks so simple in pics, I start thinking of building my own but my experience with pedals tells me it’s not so easy..



I'm the same.  I've been threatening to build an amp for years but just never got round to it as I had a pretty tidy little collection.  Now I've flogged them all to move back to NI, building my own would seem to be the way to go.  Or commissioning one from @HamishR if he wasn't so damn far away.


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## andare (Oct 13, 2022)

Wow. Building an amp is the dream. Heck, I'd be happy to build a reverb unit.
There's so much knowledge involved.
If we were close I'd pay you to teach me and would probably commission a build.

For now I'm learning to build fuzzes on turret board. In fact let me ask you if you have some tips for soldering to turrets.
I got some help here already but more help can't hurt.
Whays your procedure?
I tin the turrets at 400C with a large conical tip. Then I add the components and they wet a lot better.
Is it wrong to solder them into the whole of the turrets?


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## HamishR (Oct 13, 2022)

There are no set in stone rules that I am aware of for using turrets.  Usually with turrets I put components in the top, wiring to tube sockets etc in through the bottom and any above-board links, like B+, get wrapped around the post. Whatever makes it solid, easy, and easy to service.  I wrap the above-board wiring because it's unlikely to change. But components do change from time to time and attaching the through the top is easiest.

Oh, and when I put the wire underneath I always push the insulated part down under the board so it hits the chassis.  That way if I heat the turret it won't fall out inadvertantly.

With the amp you see above they had the wire holes drilled through the board, which is for wrapping a stripped bit of wire around the turret and poking it through the hole. Not so keen on this practise as it takes ages but it is robust and makes keeping track of things easy. Usual things apply - keep wire as short as practical, keep AC away from DC wiring, if plate wires must cross grid wires try to make it a 90 degree crossing, same as when crossing signal wire across filament wiring - 90 degrees. Avoid running any signal wiring alongside filament wiring.

Once you know the basics it's all pretty straightforward. Being neat makes everything a lot easier when troubleshooting or modifying. It helps avoid accidentally melting things too. I find the main trick is to use as little wire as possible. I'll often see builds with wire everywhere.  That's just asking for trouble.


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## music6000 (Oct 13, 2022)

Very Nice Work!
Do you notice that the Amps are less prone to background noise when using an Aluminium Chassis?


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## Dan0h (Oct 13, 2022)

Super clean and inspiring!


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## HamishR (Oct 13, 2022)

music6000 said:


> Very Nice Work!
> Do you notice that the Amps are less prone to background noise when using an Aluminium Chassis?


That's a good question! I don't know. This amp has a louder hum in standby than when fully on, which is something I have noticed on other British style builds before - I have no idea what causes it! I had a RI JTM45 years ago which did that too. But when on this amp has a similar noise floor to my last 5E3 and the little Vox I built recently too. All of them have barely any noise until you engage a dirt pedal or roll the volume up on the guitar. All there is is a very low hum which is generally drowned out by my Marshall fridge when the compressor kicks in. No discernible hiss to speak of.


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## gheorge77 (Oct 13, 2022)

music6000 said:


> Very Nice Work!
> Do you notice that the Amps are less prone to background noise when using an Aluminium Chassis?


From my experience (about 10 amp builds in), the chassis material doesn't have an impact on noise. Using metal film in the key spots is huge as is avoiding carbon comp resistors as well. I also have moved to only using 1W carbon comp for most areas of my builds. It should be noted that something like a super reverb is likely going to be noiser because of the existence of the reverb stage and the tremolo, when compared with a marshall.

I'd say my noisiest build is my 5F1 because of the on/off switch shared with the volume and my quietest build is my Valvestorm 68 Plexi build. That's my pride and joy, complete with a set of NOS testing Blackburn mullards 12ax7s and EL34.

I was worried that the slightly mismatched EL34s in there would add noise because they are biased roughly 10 mV apart but it just sounds glorious.


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## Deperduci (Oct 13, 2022)

That read as almost contradictory, I thought the noise was tamed by the neatness and style of wiring, it's not a rat nest/spider web acting as an antenna to pick up any stray EM. Truly beautiful work.


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## oldtone (Oct 13, 2022)

Great looking build! It looks professional all the way. My first tube guitar amp build was an Allen V18, which was his name at the time for a Sweetspot kit build. This was in '07. As soon as I put that puppy in stand-by for the first time I could hear hum. Put a scope on the speaker terminals and there it was...a little bit of 60 Hz, just enough to be audible. Talked to David(Allen) on the phone. It's coupling of the power transformer to the chassis or circuit itself. I think the former, not the latter. Even with everything  done correctly it's there. Dohhh!
  Loved using turrets! Don't care for eyelets. My last three builds all had them instead of eyelets. Doug Hoffman's El34 World was a great source of info for building tube stuff, especially with turrets. Almost forgot, the V18 chassis is steel(stainless?) not aluminum. My other builds did not have the stand-by hum. One of those was steel, and the other two were aluminum chassis. Those three were from-scratch builds using the design genius of Leo Fender and Valco(a duplicate of my old Harmony H415 with some changes).


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## andare (Oct 13, 2022)

Can we have pictures of the controls?


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## delayed (Oct 31, 2022)

Where is a good place to get transformers now?  Triad looks about done, and what I do see, the pricing has gone up a lot since I was working on amps.


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## cdwillis (Oct 31, 2022)

Hamish, it's a work of art. I love how clean your wiring is. I've seen so many pictures of old turret board built amps and some of them are a total rats nest of wires. Do you build the cabinets too?


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## HamishR (Oct 31, 2022)

Yes I build the cabs too. My brother bought me a table saw early this year (!) so I made a simple box joint slide for it. Now I can make all the solid pine finger jointed cabs my heart desires. I have used ply as well but prefer solid pine because it's lighter and because I like the sound.

I have a few places for transformers. It depends on the amp as to where I source them. For this one I used GDS - Gordon Stuckey.  He sells Heyboers built to his spec and they are excellent. While they are designed to be used in Marshall style builds I am currently building a Vox AC15 style amp with his 18W transformers.  Mojotone also sell Heyboer built transformers and they can be good too. 

For my tweed style builds I really like the range that Mercury Magnetics offer. They're a bit of a pain to order from at the moment because their key sales guy unfortunately died suddenly late last year and it seems he was hard to replace. So it can take a few months to get transformers out of them but they are generally worth the wait. Some of their transformers have cool features like lowered B+ voltages or power transformers with more iron ("Fatstacks") for better low end definition. Earlier this year I built a Clark-inspired 5E3 Deluxe with a MM vintage style PT with a slightly lower B+, to kinda reproduce how a 5E3 might have sounded when it was first made, when wall voltages were lower. Biased properly and using a MM self-leaded 5E3 replica '59 OT it sounds glorious.


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## HamishR (Oct 31, 2022)

These pics show the various stages the cabs go through. I really enjoy every aspect of building these things except applying the tolex.


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## cdwillis (Oct 31, 2022)

How wide are those solid pine boards you're starting with? I really want to try my hand at building a 1x12 cabinet. Actually, I'd like to build a vertical 2x12 or a Thiele style cabinet, but I'm trying to start off simple. I figured I'd make it a little oversized 1x12 first. We have a tablesaw at work and some other stuff I can use, so I'd just have to make a jig for the finger joints.


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## HamishR (Oct 31, 2022)

The boards I use are from New Zealand - they're what is available at our local hardware chain here. They're 285x19mm, so just over 11" wide by about 3/4" thick. I sort through the rack to get those which aren't too cupped or warped. They rarely have knots, being pinus radiata.

The jig for box jointing is very simple. You'll need a dado set for the saw though.


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## gheorge77 (Nov 1, 2022)

delayed said:


> Where is a good place to get transformers now?  Triad looks about done, and what I do see, the pricing has gone up a lot since I was working on amps.


I used a set of Hammonds on my 18 watt. No complaints at all, though I have yet to love them as much as the Classic Tone in all of my other builds. I've toyed with rebuilding my Matamp using Mercury metal but the sticker shock is a bit astounding.

Mojotone is a good place to grab Heyboer iron when in stock. For Fender style builds I believe Bryan Sour from Sour Amps is making some nice boutique iron though he may just be doing OTs at this point.

Losing Classic Tone has been a giant bummer.


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## HamishR (Nov 1, 2022)

I never got to try Classic Tone.  :-(  I have used Mercury for years because of the oddball variety. I love their fatstack power trannies. They do a range of B+ voltages for some of the more popular amp circuits. Heyboer are just as good but it depends on who specifies the transformers. I've used plenty of Mojo-Heyboer and some are just ok. When people like Marstran or GDS specify them they can be wonderful. I have even bought Victoria transformers from Victoria - pretty sure they're made by Heyboer.

Mercury are frustrating because they are good but over-priced and right now they are difficult to get because the guy I used to deal with, Patrick Selfridge isn't there any more and whoever they get to do that job just isn't as switched on or knowledgable. The transformers are excellent though and usually nicely finished. Not so important for a transformer I guess but the Mercurys do look good.


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## apc42069 (Nov 1, 2022)

wow siiiiiick!!


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