Worked a bit on my Twin's trem - whee!

[mothershipzeta]

Today I didn't really have anything to do, so I did my long overdue mods/repairs on my Twin Reverb. Firstly, I really wanted to slow the LFO down, as at its lowest setting it was still a lot faster than I'd liked it to be. I did this by soldering two 0.01 uF caps in parallel to the 0.01's that were already there, thus increasing the overall value to 0.02 uF, and slowing the LFO to half the speed. I didn't replace the caps, because 1: I only had one 0.02 cap 2: I really couldn't be bothered about lifting the existing ones 3: I'm all about finishing a project in one go
It could be prettier, but I'm happy:



Result: Now with the speed on 10 it is still faster than I'd ever need, the speed that was previously slowest is at around 5 now, and below that enter dreamy Bohren territory - I don't know what I was waiting for.

The amp didn't have a footswitch when I got it, so I built one for it a while ago, but now I finally made a nice cable to with it with some angled RCA's I got off of eBay. One thing that always annoyed me was the loud pop when I turned on the Vibrato when the Reverb was on. I found a great thread on shortscale.org that had a cure for this: solder a 4.7 uF electrolytic cap to the Vibrato switch's lugs (positive to ground) and the click is history.
Again, I'm sure it could have been done nicer, but I like it a lot:



I had a couple more of those angled RCA's, so the last thing I did was making a high quality cable for the reverb send/return instead of the craptacular chinese one I had in there for - jesus - 3 years. Result: It killed nearly 1/3 of the noise when the reverb is switched on - I couldn't believe this made such a huge difference, I mainly made it for aesthetics.. I guess I must have had a really crappy one in there before.
OMG a pic of a cable:



Anyway, I'm really happy about my amp now, I only need to find an effective way to clean the tolex (any ideas?), and make back panels for it to protect teh tubez.

[garyfanclub]

Sounds like we need clips of the s-u-p-e-r-s-l-o-w trem...

That footswitch is gorgeous, by the way.

[jimboyogi]

Great work all around, and I agree on the footswitch^, love the labelling!

[marqueemoon]

Cool. I've always been curious about upgrading spring tank RCA cables.

How much weight did all of this add?

[sookwinder]

I suspect you meant 0.01uF ... not 0.1uF

If you solder two alligator clips to the wires of say a 0.047uF cap or a 0.033uF and use that you can easily see/hear how much the additional caps change the speed... without having to solder on to the amp.

[pad]

Cool. I've always been curious about upgrading spring tank RCA cables.

How much weight did all of this add?

Its a twin, do we need to talk about weight?

[mothershipzeta]

Oh yes, I meant 0.01 uF, I edited my first post, so no one gets confused. Thanks for spotting it!

I'll try and post some clips if I get it back to my rehearsal space where I can mic it up properly.

And yeah, adding fancy connectors and a cable didn't add much weight, unlike the '65 RI legs which I got for it because the originals were long gone. But as pad said, you sort of slowly let go of worrying about weight in case of a twin... It'll always be heavy as hell, especially these later ones.

Since my first post my new Sovtek power tubes arrived, and I messed around the preamp section with tubes I had laying around to see which works well in which spot - I just love how the amp sounds right now. People of the Internetz seem to have an undying furious hate for the UL era Silverfaces, but this one always sounded just right to me. Cleaned it up as well, I'll post a pic later.