Hoffman Amplifiers Tube Amplifier Forum

Forum and Web site Stuff => Introduce Yourself => Topic started by: YogiBB on July 25, 2025, 05:01:33 pm

Title: Greetings and Salutations!
Post by: YogiBB on July 25, 2025, 05:01:33 pm
Well I finally found my way here.  This seems to be a great place to learn about tube amps.  I'm Bruce and a huge lover of music.  Anything from Bluegrass to Hard Rock.  Probably no surprise but, I tend to gravitate to Blues and Classic Rock.  Imagine that.  I don't work as an electronic tech, even though I have a degree in Electricity and Electronics from years ago and they told me relays and tubes were on their way out. Since graduating, I have been working in Railroad Signalling where vital B1 & B2 relays are still thriving and here I am learning about the best guitar amps made, powered by the venerable vacuum tube. I've made a rather large collection of Strats, Teles and a couple Jazzmasters as well.  I really enjoy the different guitars with different pickups.  I really dig a good P-90 and absolutely love Wide Range Humbuckers.  I even shoe-horned them into a couple Strats. Any way, I'm glad to be here and it's just a matter of time before I build something.  I have several Silverface Bandmasters, 3 71s and one 75 which has a Master Volume BUT is NOT an Ultra-Linear with the solid state rectifier.  It still has the 5U4GB rectifer, Score!  I didn't know they made these.  One of my 71's came with a couple mods, a variable NFB and Tremolo off switch to bump up the gain. When I got it it had issues which led me to doing some trouble shooting. First off I found 2 cold solder joints which I fixed & that took care of the intermittent drop out of audio but the next took a little research.  No Tremolo.  It took me a few times to realize I actually had Tremolo, I just had to turn the Intensity to 9 and there it was.  It turns out the On/off rotary 50K pot wasn't a Reverse Audio.  They apparently don't make those so thanks to Rob Robinette, I disassembled a 50KRA pot and took it's resistor element and put it into my existing switched pot.  This took some shade tree engineering as they were 2 different brands, but I got it done and now I have functioning Tremolo!  This amp is serving as my test case to determine what mods I would like to incorporate into a modified AB763 Vibroverb head build.  After lurking around here a few days, I kinda feel like I might like to do something in Tweed now too.  You guys may be contributing to a new disease of mine. 
Title: Greetings and Salutations!
Post by: EL34 on July 25, 2025, 05:01:33 pm
Welcome to the Hoffman Amps forum

There are many different boards on this forum for different topics.

The Tube Amp Building - Tweaks - Repairs board is where you can post amp questions.

That board is listed here.
https://el34world.com/Forum/index.php?board=13.0

Thanks,
Doug Hoffman