My lucky day... SCORE!

[stingray_65]

Some days you just got to ride with what life throws at you.

There are 3 places to buy cigs in this tiny town I live in, The grocery store and 2 gas stations.

None of them had my brand this morning and I had been out for a couple hours. (very grumpy man)

Had to run 12 miles to the next town and the next 2 places didn't have them either.

A guy in line at the last stop told me to go to a carryout  on the other side of town.

SO as I'm meandering through the back streets to the carryout I see a small combo amp sitting on a table at a garage sale.

It's a fairly new Epiphone Galaxy 10, the owner said it was JUNK, had it less than a year and it keeps blowing fuses.

He tried to fix it by buying new tubes for it but that didn't help.(neither did the aluminum foil covered fuse )

$5 bought me a broken down amp, 3 Sovetek 6l6WGT/5881 's, 2 Ruby Tube 12AX7's and get this! an RCA 7025 mfr date 35th week of 1957 triple mica's and long black plates.

ALL the tubes test strong to new on my Eico 666.

So on the bench, tubes pulled, aluminum foil fuse in, voltage chart in my hand, I plug it in and see all the voltages about 25% low.

Then I start to smell the heat 

OT is smoking HOT!!!

Clip the wires to the OT and all voltages back to normal.

Think I gots myself a great little cab and chassis to throw a Hoffman board into!

OH! yeah! the carry out  had my smokes and I saved a buck a pack so I bought 5 packs and I figured that paid for the amp! 

Ray

[jjasilli]

Happy Labor Day Weekend!

[nateflanigan]

That's down right heart warming.

[eleventeen]

That's great! Always appreciate those "alternate road" stories.

I scored with the old man's garage full of NOS tubes & radios. I traded 6 WW2 vintage radios in scary condition that I wouldn't touch for blood or money for a Hickok 600A tester in good shape and monster hp 712B p/s---500 vdc & 250ma. Than I sold other radios for about $1000...this last I sold for $382 and I tell ya, if you had offered me $15 for it the day I was hauling all this crud I would have taken it and thanked you. Still have about 20% of the haul left.

Btw, the fellow who traded me the Hickok operates this site www.radioblvd.com and runs the Western Historic Radio Museum out of Virginia City, NV. Turns out, I had 3-4-5 of his favorite things from the garage of doom. Plus I had a 12" hang-on-the-wall speaker in a black krinkle sheet metal cabinet that is definitely period authentic. He really liked that. This guy makes all these old radios work! Very nice guy, and truly excellent website.

One of my better scores was about 30 years ago. I had the habit like many of us do of wandering into music stores whenever I ran across them. The store had nothing of interest, but in the back was a rabbit-warren of little rooms they used to give lessons in. The place looked like it had last been painted in 1957, but it had b/w photos of high school kids proudly playing their guitars at a sschool show or something. What a collection! Other than one Harmony, every guitar was either an ES-175, and ES-125, Les Paul Junior or Telecaster. And the amps were wonderful, Tremoluxes, Bassman, and Bandmasters all tilted back on their legs. Cool. So, all the pictures had Dymo labels of the kids' names. And I thought "how stupid would it be to copy down these names and invest $2 in dimes trying to reach these folks via telephone (what we used back then)  and see if they still had their guitars?" Well, of course many had moved, and some had common names with 20 iterations, but one guy, the guy with ES-175, said...."come to think of it, I DO have an old guitar that's just sitting around, but it's not that hollow body one, it's a Fender, it's a Stratomaster or something like that. Gimme $125 and it's yours if you want it. Long story short, I got a 7-condition 1959 maple neck Strat for $125. And, it was hands down THE WORST sounding Strat I have ever encountered. But I sold it the next day for $1300. Today? It'd be worth 20 times that.

^^^^^^^^^

GEEEZ, find another used one of those for near $100 and you have a great starting place for a combo project. You probably got the only $5 one for sale! Nice job!

[samato]

Now that's a good reason not to give up smoking! 

[supro66]

Think I gots myself a great little cab and chassis to throw a Hoffman board into!

OH! yeah! the carry out  had my smokes and I saved a buck a pack so I bought 5 packs and I figured that paid for the amp! 

Ray

And some people tell you smoking is bad 

You Got a Lucky Strike