I got this idea from a YouTube video of a guy who wired this same amplifier into a Marshall Cab and was pretty impressed with the sound from that demo. I still had mine laying around so I did the same thing and plugged it into the 1x12 I’m making (Jensen Mod) and was even more impressed than I expected with the result. I went ahead and removed the amp portion from the original housing and slapped together my own housing with a speaker out jack.
Edit: I don’t know why the photo keeps showing up sideways for me, i tried to rotate it and upload again but that hasn’t fixed it. Apologies for this…
That looks absolutely amazing. Never seen an amp with quite that shade of wood finish. Great work.
Any plans to finish the wood, or leave it raw?
As far as the cab goes, I’m going to round out the corners and either trim them with metal, hardwood, plastic, or if it looks okay enough, i might just leave the plywood bare. I did stain the rest of the outside with tung oil though I didn’t show that in picture. The front will be covered with cloth to keep cats and kids off the speaker cone.
The amp itself will probably be left bare.
A lot of practice amps have really nice cleans at bedroom volumes. Like not just acceptable but really really good. My teacher has this cheap $100 Marshall 8 inch practice amp and the cleans blow a way a lot of $1k amps… at bedroom volume.
How does this one sound clean, Doty, quiet and loud?
It sounds pretty good at family friendly volumes whether I’m running it clean or dirty. I haven’t tested it loud yet, but will this weekend. With this amp I usually just leave it on the overdrive channel and use my guitar’s volume to control gain. The cleans and dirty sounds are both great, hard to describe since it really has its own thing going on. It vaguely reminds me of an old school Mesa. Again, the speaker made all the difference.
Looks great! Can you provide a link to the video?
Often these little practice amps are better than you think, but are held back by the stock speakers and cabinet. I got a Fender 15G free when I bought a guitar years ago. Recently, I populated the circuit board for reverb, added a spring tank, and swapped in a Celestion speaker, and it’s now pretty good.
But a few weeks ago I ended up with another free Fender 15G! This time I think I’ll build a new cabinet for it as well as adding in the reverb.
💀
It’s an Epiphone Electar 10. I’ve seen them on eBay for $30, so super cheap.
Nice build! Yeah. I have a Kustom KGA 10FX I won on ebay for 1 British penny! 😄 It’s built in a way so that the amplifier can be taken out as stand alone and has a speaker cab output. I’ve been toying with the idea of doing something similar to this.
