Dumble Explosion

[rogb]

After being so delighted with the Tweedle Dee and before it my 2nd Gen hybrid, I've been trawling back through some early posts by the Godfathers of Dumble Discussion, as I was trying to trace back from the ODS through to the earliest documented Dumble amps, two things became apparent.

One, how much was contributed to this section by those early pioneers (or pirates...) researching and then making available the circuits we love but thought we would never have a chance to enjoy, Gil, Scott, Henry, Brandon and of course many others who chipped in with their expertise, Tony, Normster, Martin, Mark, well the list goes on, and of course Max who documents the generations so carefully.

And two, a name that kept cropping up - the Explosion. Well that alone stirred my interest.
I would love to know more about this predecessor to the ODS, especially the Explosion rotary switch 0, 1,2 levels of "Explosion"! (Just love the idea of setting Explosion Level II!)
I would really be interested in getting one off the ground but my layout skills are apparently lacking as I was one of those who was dismissed as rubbish in the early and exciting documenting of the Tweedle Dee. Fortunately there are others more talented on the forum

Any one interested in an Explosion? I know I am now that the Tweedle Dee is done?

Regards
Rog

[lord preset]

I was disappointed that this thread was not about an exploding Dumble. But never having heard of a Dumble Explosion, a bit of Googling yielded some passing references but not a single picture of the amp. I will be very interested if the TAG brain trust can scape together enough info to clone one of these. If it can maybe the next project should be a T. Rex.

[rogb]

I was disappointed that this thread was not about an exploding Dumble. But never having heard of a Dumble Explosion, a bit of Googling yielded some passing references but not a single picture of the amp. I will be very interested if the TAG brain trust can scape together enough info to clone one of these. If it can maybe the next project should be a T. Rex.

As far as I can tell, Explosions were based on Bandmasters - so the 6L6
power amp seems to have been taken from this era.
Rob Livesey has a page of photos:
http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/s ... andmaster/

[Smokebreak]

I've done a fair amount of pondering on the subject, and when I built my Overdrive Deluxe, I implemented a 3 way rotary.

If you look at the pics of the ODD, which I believe to be considered an "Explosion" era amp(at least for the sake of discussing the 3-way rotary), you can see that it's a 2nd/3rd gen type circuit, with the funky entrance mounted directly underneath the rotary. So, that accounts for at least the clean/OD as we know it.

As for the "3rd" position(or maybe the second!), I'm not convinced whether it falls somewhere inbetween the clean and OD that we know, or if it's a step beyond, and more gain than the usual OD. But, unless there is an unseen component mounted on the rotary, there's only really 2 things that can happen : the 180K//500p leg of the entrance gets lifted, or the 33K leg gets lifted.
From experimentation, lifting the 180K leg doesn't do too much, at least in the sense of warranting a position on the switch. Lifting the 33K leg obviously gives a massive, almost unusable amount of gain. Perhaps that's why the 3 way was abandoned eventually.
For my amp, I ended up switching out values for the last leg to ground at the entrance, for more gain in the third position.
Take all this with a grain of salt I'd enjoy hearing others' musings as well.