Princeton Build Report

[humbug]

Last summer, I built my first amp: Doug's 5F2A Princeton. Now, I'm a little headstrong and decided to bend my own chassis from aluminum and design it with the chassis on the bottom of the box rather than on the top as in the original. I liked the idea of the tubes sitting upright rather than hanging down.

I had some old 7/8" cedar wood that I bought some time ago that I used for the box and learned how to do finger joints on this box (with home-made jig on my home-made router table). The result was typical of my work -- which is pure escapism and fun for me and never professional quality by any means. It was nice but had a few critical flaws. The worst flaw was that I used 6mm marine plywood for the speaker baffle covered with speaker cloth. It rattled at higher volume.

So the result is the final product in this picture. It's a nice amp and looks kind of retro I think. 

P. S. I've been playing with pedals lately. The pedal in the picture is a Tube Screamer 808 clone I put in a hollowed out piece of black walnut I have had forever....

[Willabe]

They both look great!   

Now that's a pedal! I LOVE the bumps on the side of it. 

Can you post a pic of the back side of the amp too? (So we can see the chassis layout.)

[humbug]

Thank you! Much appreciated. As I said, my woodwork has flaws and I just do it for my own fun. Here's the back with 2 pics. I removed the upper back panel recently. It sounded "hollow" with it installed. It is kind of a big box for an 8 inch speaker....

The aluminum for the chassis was too heavy. Thinner alum would have worked much better and I could have gotten straighter sides and sharper corners. But it all works!

I'm including a couple pics of the pedal. The one on the left is one I'm doing for a friend and you can see the "innerds." The black paint inside is RF reflective paint that is used on the inside of a guitar to block interference. It works perfectly on these wooden pedals. The last pic shows the original piece of walnut with the "warts" on the outside of the bark. I just had to keep them on my pedal. 

Best,

Steve

[HotBluePlates]

Pretty build!! I really like the metal trim strips on the baffle board.