1966 Fender Twin Reverb

Awesome amp that came to me in pretty bad shape! This was an ebay purchase from about 10 years ago. The amp came wrapped in cardboard and the power amp tubes had all fallen out of their sockets. Everything except the speakers (garbage Peavey Scorpions) were original and the previous owner had installed a light switch inside an electrical box inside of the cabinet. The only redeeming aspect of these terrible DIY mods was that the double electrical box perfectly preserved the tube diagram sticker inside of the amp. I immediately took it to the only amp tech in town who replaced the screen grid resistors on the power tubes (cool, old 2 watt carbon comp resistors). He also (apparently) installed a grounded power cord and replaced one capacitor.

Fast forward 10 years, the amp makes it from Ann Arbor to Kalamazoo to Lansing and then to Portland, Oregon all in its trusty Anvil case. Before the move to Portland I replaced the speakers with Weber VST 12", which make a HUGE difference! A month or so after moving to Portland I took it to Eric at Wired Audio Repair to have a look at the amp. It turns out the tech from Ann Arbor (who has since disappeared from the face of the planet) did a shotty job all around. Eric replaced all of the major capacitors with Sprague Atom caps, including the one that the Ann Arbor tech installed 10 years back. He added a resistor to ground on the pilot lamp and fixed the ticking sound on my vibrato. He cleaned all the pots (they're better than they've ever been!), and tube sockets and rebiased the tubes, which were set very cold!

While the amp may have lost a little mojo with the replacement of many of its original parts, I take solace in the fact that Eric used high quality replacements. The amp is much safer and will be much more reliable than it has been in a long time. I would highly recommend Eric, who was both knowledgable and professional. He took the time to explain all the work he did and even ordered some parts for a pedal project I was working on.