Behold the Procrastertron!

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lord preset
Posts: 447
Joined: Tue Aug 27, 2013 3:06 am
Location: San Diego

Behold the Procrastertron!

Post by lord preset »

I just finished an amp I am calling the Procrastertron in honor of it sitting on the bench since January. It began as a Tweed Bluezmeister as documented in: https://tubeamparchive.com/viewtopic.ph ... sc&start=0

I completed the initial build fairly quickly, ran into some slow going troubleshooting my mistakes and got sidetracked on to other projects. It's baleful stare finally made me feel guilty so I recently went back to finding what I did wrong. Lots of things as it turns out. For one thing 150R resistors look an awful lot like 150K resistors if you aren't paying enough attention. Initially I was getting way early breakup and unresponsive tone controls on the clean channel and not much at all on OD. I bypassed the Clean/OD switching and concentrated on getting the clean channel working. In the process of fiddling I finally ended up ripping out the rock/jazz switch and reverting to a fender BF tonestack with some altered cap values. I was still not happy with the headroom and I ended up switching from cathode bias to fixed bias.

When I turned to the OD side I discovered I had a 150R (vs 150K) resistor on the plate of V2B, as well as some switch routing errors. I also ended up taking out the "Trim Boost" pot and relay as they didn't seem all that useful to me.

So now I have a nice. light compact amp with good cleans and OD but it no longer bears much resemblance to the Tweed Bluezmeister design I started with. I'm sure that if I had been more patient debugging the original build instead of ripping stuff out it would have been great but this also works for me. And what started as a relatively neat build for me ended up looking quite a bit more disheveled after lots of rework,
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Smokebreak
Posts: 1391
Joined: Tue Dec 18, 2012 5:53 pm
Location: Texas

Re: Behold the Procrastertron!

Post by Smokebreak »

Looks great! Glad you got it finished. Are you using an 12AY7 in V1?
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lord preset
Posts: 447
Joined: Tue Aug 27, 2013 3:06 am
Location: San Diego

Re: Behold the Procrastertron!

Post by lord preset »

Smokebreak wrote:Looks great! Glad you got it finished. Are you using an 12AY7 in V1?
Nope, just a 12ax7.
bluesfendermanblues
Posts: 1314
Joined: Tue May 22, 2007 12:57 pm
Location: Dumble City, Europe

Re: Behold the Procrastertron!

Post by bluesfendermanblues »

Very nice!
Diva or not? - Respect for Mr. D's work....)
studiodunn
Posts: 293
Joined: Wed Nov 24, 2010 8:50 pm

Re: Behold the Procrastertron!

Post by studiodunn »

That looks great! And the name is pure gold.
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