2020 Swart Space Tone Tremolo

This single ended hand-wired boutique amp made by Swart is a fine piece of gear with great construction and parts quality. It also sounds fantastic, it was a treat to hear a Class A amp with spring reverb, bias wiggle tremolo, and simple controls. It’s tube lineup is: 5Y3, 6V6S, 12AX7, 12DW7, 12AX7. It came in with power/volume dropping issues and the customer wanted all the tubes tested including a backup set.

The problem only arose at max volume and with a hot input signal. Essentially it was a combination of a few things. 1: There were a couple of solder joints around the power cord that needed touch up. 2: The input 12AX7, and the 6V6GT did not have much life left and were suspect - these were replaced with an EHX 12AX7 and JJ 6V6GT. 3: The amp can use either a 5Y3GT rectifier tube which has a lot of power sag, or a higher rated GZ34 which has relatively little voltage drop or power sag. For this reason I installed a JJ GZ34 rectifier to reduce sag at high volumes. 4: The last issue was that a 3AG SLO-BLO fuse that had been installed in the amp was only rated for 500mA when the tube chart calls for a 2amp fuse. This was replaced for obvious reasons.

The amp now functions normally.