Wish me luck please.

[Stevem]

I took in 1987 Highwatt 50, you know the era with the circuit boards

In all of these years of doing this repair stuff this is only my second time into one of these and someone has already been into this jumping out preamp tube circuit traces to get the peice of crap to work again, and now it needs either two preamp tube sockets replaced or jumped around back to the board traces from what I can initially tell.

Oh, and did I mention the control pots that stand up off the board with no support that love to snap off once you flip the main board over to work on the circuit trace side?

I must be out of my mind for diving into repairing this thing !!

I will post up some pictures tomorrow of the guts of this thing if I am not already in a insane asylum .

PS, very small OT in these years!

[R.G.]

Yikes!

That style of PCB construction was what led me to set up the Workhorse amps with flying leads to the pots, jacks and switches, and also leads off to the tube sockets; and to do the mechanics so a repairman could get to -both- sides of the PCB without removing it from the chassis.

I interviewed some amp techs and asked them "what makes an amp hard to work on?" and got a barrage of "don't do THIS!!" advice.

[mhuss]

I hate those little Piher pots.

[didit]

Wishing you luck --- however, also commend some slow steady hands and perhaps a dose of applied equanimity ..

[Stevem]

Well two new sockets in without the need for jumpers ( miracle ! ) like the 3 that had already been worked on before me.

Two of the dammed nylon board standoffs busted due to age so I need to work around that.

The amp now works but has low distorted output on both clean and lead channels.

It only has 410 volts on the 34 plates which is odd since it does not seem to be biased too hot, there’s no hum, filters look good and the filament voltage is good.
I will look into that issue tomorrow.