1971 Fender Champ

This Champ had been badly botched by an amateur “tech” and needed to be completely rewired with all new caps, mostly new resistors, and a ton of other parts. There was almost nothing original about this amp, the output transformer had been changed to one with the completely wrong spec for this amp, the 6V6 tube socket had a hole burned in it because a GZ34 rectifier was put in its place (someone actually did this!), many caps had the wrong values, wiring mistakes all over, etcetera, etc. For all these reasons, nothing was lost with restoring this back to original factory spec and re-doing just about everything inside.

I went with more of a Black-Panel look/layout with the wiring as Silver-Panel era amps got pretty sloppy in that department. Also the original electrolytic cap can had been removed and turret strips permanently riveted into place over the space needed for the can - it was done in a way that taking the rivets out would have been ugly so I decided to re-use the turret strips. Usually I would’ve just put in a new CE manufactured vintage spec cap can and called it a day - but I had to work with some pretty unfortunate choices here and tried to make the best out of it. German made F+T caps were used for the filter section. A new Classic-Tone output transformer was installed that had the correct impedance on the primary and secondary sides - an exact reproduction of the Fender Champ OT from 60’s/70’s era.

A new set of tubes were put in, V1 = Tungsol 12AX7, V2 = JJ 6V6S, and V3 = NOS (General Electric) 5Y3GT. The Cathode Bias of the 6V6S wast set to 97% Class A Plate Dissipation. Basically a brand new boutique amp tucked into a vintage chassis.