# New Very Old Amp Day!



## buckaroobanzai (Feb 2, 2006)

I volunteered to help my Dad clean out a basement and garage for an old friend of his that has passed on. His wife is moving to a seniors apartment and we are helping get the house ready for sale. A musty old box in the garage rafters held a few tubes (unfortunately they are old TV tubes, not much use) - and THIS.



No, not the Traynor cab , I've had that for a while. The amp chassis is a Pepco/Pine/Riviera/YourNameHere 725 from the 1960's from what I can tell. It seems to be a later model with SS rectification. The chassis is one of the cleanest I have seen. The wife was happy to gift it to me for helping with the house. I took it home, put tubes in it and fired it up on my light-bulb rig. No magic smoke, so I connected it up to the Traynor cab , plugged in a Tele and was richly rewarded. Decent sound, and enough volume for the wife to tell me to turn the farkin' thing down.
The weird part is the the guy was not musical in the least, his hobby was model trains. So no idea what the amp was doing there.
It could likely use a cap job, but so far it sounds fine with no buzzes, clicks or pops, all the controls work smoothly and quietly. It's got some guy from Montreal's repair sticker inside, so some work may have been done on it in the past. 
I am looking forward to putting a 3-prong cord on it, and building a cab for it. Comments and suggestions for improvement would be welcome!

A few more pictures-


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## WCGill (Mar 27, 2009)

Wow, a real power transformer and push pull. It should have some cojones. Good score!


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## Clean Channel (Apr 18, 2011)

Wow, very cool score! I like the look of those tidy PTP insides!


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## Guest (Nov 30, 2013)

It pays to be nice.
congrats! hope it's ready in time for the next Riff Wrath jam.


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## Milkman (Feb 2, 2006)

Wow that's a clean chassis! Talk about point to point!

How much power do you figure?


Nice score man.


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## bolero (Oct 11, 2006)

cool old amp, how does it sound?

circuit looks simple enough, I wonder what it's based on....have you cranked it up yet? if you're lucky it sounds like an old deluxe

it's probably 15-18watts?


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## buckaroobanzai (Feb 2, 2006)

Yep, definitely Deluxe territory. Nice clean with enough breakup for blues. The ear-o-meter says its probably 12-15 watts. Can't turn it full-up in the townhouse without the next-doors getting cranky. But i get good sounds thru a 1 x12 in the house, and it should be loud enough thru the 2 x12 Traynor to hang with the band. And, as an added bonus, I've finally found an amp that likes the old DOD FX-55B Overdrive I've had since high school! Not sure why I never got rid of it - it sounded like bees in a can with practically everything. But it crunches this old amp up nicely.

Going to start throwing together a basic head cab for it this week. Once that's done I will hopefully put some samples up.


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## buckaroobanzai (Feb 2, 2006)

OK, finally an update. It took me a while to get to making a cab for this, but it's finally done. I am happy with most of it, with the exception of the front grille ( I used nylon speaker cloth on it and it ripples too much) and the back dress panel (I used spray glue on it and its bubbling). I will fix these issues later, but first its got to go to practice and get cranked!

The "Sykes" logo comes from a destroyed 4 x 10 column I pulled out of the garbage. To me ,it's appropriate, because I first fell in love with shiny guitars and amps while visiting Sykes in Toronto with my Dad.

( sorry for crappy cellphone photo, I will try to post better pix later....)


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