2000 Rivera Knucklehead

This amp is essentially a Soldano SLO-100 type circuit with cascading gain stages, two channels (1 = Cleanish, 2 = High Gain) and 100 watts of power. It features well engineered PCB construction typical of boutique high gain amps, high quality radial Nichicon caps, massive Power/Output Transformers, and optical relay based switching. Genres that the Rivera Knucklehead excels at would be anything in the vicinity of hard rock or metal - and with a true 100 watts RMS of output power it can keep up with any volume level or band context. This particular Rivera came in with no output and was turning itself off after warming up. It also had issues with noise and crackling on it’s pots and switches.

The solution was pretty simple - all that was needed was a full re-tube and a thorough cleaning inside and out. The tube compliment installed is as follows: V1-V5 = JJ 12AX7S, V6-V9 = JJ E34L Blue Glass Matched Quad. The Fixed Bias was set to approx. 70% Class AB Plate Dissipation with a B+ of 455VDC. All pots and switches were sprayed out with De-Oxit and all tube sockets were cleaned with a De-Oxit solution as well. All symptoms resolved.