I wasted no time after finishing the Weber 5E5A kit to start my BYOC Tweed Royal kit.
I couldn't find much in the way of reviews for the kit but I thought the concept was really neat. My original plan was to wait until I was finished the Weber to even purchase it but July's 25% off sale was too enticing to say no to.
I ordered my kit with no speaker and no tubes. I had new JJ's and plenty of loose 12" speakers to pick from. The discount only applied to the kit and not the tubes or speaker.
One thing that differentiated this kit from the Weber kit is that there were instructions. This kind of gave me more focus and was incredibly detailed about things such as lengths of wire needed.
Another thing worth noting is that the transformers are all made in the USA. The bulk of the resistors are carbon comp (for that old school mojo), the caps are Sprague, Switchcraft jacks, and the board is a turret style board instead of an eyelet board (as found on most Fender amps). The wire the kit came with is also vintage style pushback wire which is a blast to work with! One thing that I was a bit puzzled by was that one of the color wires provided was not pushback wire but was actually cloth covered normally insulated wire. After using pushback wire, I never want to use anything else. The only negative I could come up with immediately was the use of Alpha pots. I understand that they have a selection that most other manufacturers can't compete with, but I am just not a fan. Additionally, my PT came with dented bells. Somebody probably dropped it before it was ever packed. The kit came well packed and the damaged didn't look very severe so I figured I'd try the kit and if I had problems I'd worry about it then.
I followed the instructions building up the board first. This process went very quickly. I would have been a little happier if the turrets had a slightly larger opening in them so that I could fit some of the thicker lead parts in without difficulty. Some of the turrets didn't want to take on the solder very easily either. If I had known, I would have cleaned each of the turrets with some coarse sandpaper first. Yes, it would have been a lot of work, but it would have saved me even more frustration.
Next I built up the chassis. This was mostly just putting the sockets (which like the Weber kits are also ceramic), transformers, and pots into place.
As I mentioned in my last entry with the 5E5A, it seems like heater wiring is just an afterthought, but I like to run my filament line while nothing else is in the amp to get in the way and then tuck the wires into the corner of the chassis. So needless to say, I skipped ahead to the last instruction and ended up using some of the twisted wires from the Pro build to run the heaters instead of the solid pushback wire they included.
Sorry BYOC, my heater wiring looked nicer than the picture in the instructions. That kind of brings me to another point which may be jumping ahead a bit. Some of the instructions were not done in the most logical order. This meant going back and doing things that you could have done earlier as well as having to solder connections that were made underneath of prior connections which isn't so easy.
Another "quirk" I found was that some of the wire colors change in the instructions from white to yellow or yellow to white. Not a big deal. At least one wire is referenced as though you had soldered it to the turret board and were making a connection to one of the sockets. I had triple checked the instructions and this wire was never mentioned prior. Not a big deal either. What IS a big deal is that a lot of the lengths of wire that I carefully measured out as per the instructions were more than just a little short. My advice, if you are building this kit, tack on at least an inch to each run of wire coming off of the turret board. Not all of them are short, but they give you plenty of wire so don't be stingy with it. I just assumed (wrongly) that it was carefully measured and was done for good lead dress.
What I ended up with was a lot of reworking and wasted wire. Most of the wasted wire was salvaged for other steps that required short pieces of wire to act as jumpers.
Possibly the most frustrating part of this kit was that some parts that are inherently designed to accept solder refused. I had a serious fight with the fuse holder. You would expect that the fuse holder would take solder as it is meant to. I had to "unsolder" (as though my solder wasn't literally just dripping off of the fuse holder) the wire and go over the surface with coarse sandpaper. Then it finally stuck. What is weird is that only one of the 2 terminals on the fuse holder gave me any trouble. I also mentioned how some of the turrets themselves weren't so good about accepting solder. I used a small mill file to score the surfaces and get the solder to flow. And both of these were nothing compared to the back of the 2 volume pots which were grounded with a jumper lead. I could not get solder to stick to them. The instructions warned that there was a coating added to the backs of the pots to prevent soldering to them. WHY!? That is the most bizarre thing I have ever heard. I ignored this advice (quite foolishly) and quickly found that the pots were indeed coated with something that made the solder run right off of them. Again, WHY!? I tried scoring them with sandpaper the same way I had scored the fuse holder and while that helped, it didn't eliminate the problem. My solder joints to the back of the pots looks worse than my first time out with a soldering iron on my friend's crappy guitar. Not a proud moment for me then or now.
I've never run into anything like that before. If I had to do it all over again, I'd take that note a little more seriously, and really dig in with the sandpaper. Don't even bother with steel wool. It isn't abrasive enough to remove this heavy film of god only knows what. I don't think I have ever swore so much at a piece of electronic equipment (besides the computer of course) in all of my life.
After getting the entire kit together, I had to decide what speaker I was going to put in the amp. I was originally going to use an old Jensen C12R. I have a set of 4 and this was the right sort of wattage for that speaker. I also had a modern Jensen P12R that came in a broken Fender Musicmaster amplifier project. In the end, I decided that I would rob the Musicmaster of the P12R and put in a C12R.
This turned out to be a mistake that would cost me a bit of time.
I wired everything up and loaded the pilot light bulb, fuse, and tubes. I plugged the amplifier in and grabbed my Jap Strat. I kicked it off of standby and into SE. The volume was VERY low and everything was fuzzy. It sounded cool, but it didn't sound right. I turned all of the controls and they seemingly did what they were supposed to, only at low and fuzzy volumes.
Something was definitely wrong.
I turned off the amplifier and took it back to the shop. I didn't even screw around with taking it apart. I just disconnected the speaker and tried the 15" from the Weber 5E5A. Immediately the amplifier began behaving exactly like I expected it to!
I played with all of the controls and honestly, this amp could have just been a champ and I'd have been happy. The tone control is nice I guess, but it sounded good with it off and the cut control is a nice feature too, but again, it sounded plenty good off. The Single Ended and Push Pull modes were the big selling point for me and yes, it is a little different tonally as well as volume wise. But is it all that much different? Not really. I love how the amp sounds, but I guess I'd have been content with a Champ.
The next day I woke up early in the morning and removed the bad P12R and installed the C12R. 30 minutes later, I had the amp completely back together and ready for testing again. This time it made some crackling noise intermittently. I shut the amp down. Apparently, during the course of disassembly and reassembly, I had bumped the preamp tubes in their sockets. The rectifier and power tubes had been removed but I left the preamp tubes in place. I thought I'd save myself some time this way but I ended up having to remove them to reseat them anyway. Let this be a lesson about trying to save a few minutes.
After the tubes had been reseated, I turned the amp on again and this time everything worked as it was supposed to with no obnoxious crackling or noise. The amp does have a small hum about it which could be the layout or the fact that I primarily tested it in SE mode. The push pull setup should remove some of the noise due to the noise cancelling attributes it has.
The noise is not all that loud and like most things, I am probably nitpicking. The amp sounds really good. I am still happy with a single channel and the volume control though. Maybe with a hotter guitar the cut and tone controls would be more useful but I was using my strat with an underwound neck.
One side note about the basic circuit (ignoring the fact that this amp is like a Swiss army knife) is that I can completely see why Fender moved away from this style of circuit and into fixed bias amps. While the purpose of this amp (for me anyway) is to get a nice breakup at a relatively low volume (and it does it well), the amp has almost no headroom. It breaks up very early and has enough gain to drive a much larger amp. Even in the PP mode, the amp doesn't gain all that much in the way of headroom. This is a nice thing for those of us who want a cranked amp sound without a visit from the local police department, but Obtaining 4-12 clean watts out of this amp is not really likely.
To conclude this review, I'd like to say that the kit sounds really good and it may be exactly what you are looking for if you like gear with lots of options to tweak your sound to the smallest detail. But if you are more like me, you are going to find a lot of the options gratuitous. This isn't to say that I don't like the amp. I really do. I think it sounds great (as I've stated at least 4 times now), but I also know now that I'd have been totally content without all of these options.
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