Gretsch 6162
The incredibly complex guts of the 6162. How not to wire an amp. Everything is somewhere else.
The guts of the power amp. Not so bad when there's only a handful of parts to deal with. This is before rebuild, when the amp still contained spiders, leaves, dust, matches, and unidentified frying objects.
Of everything out there, the Crate V-amps have the closest usable match to the original Gretsch vinyl covering.
Here it is cleaned up and mostly rebuilt. At least it has a real ground now, and not a deathtrap polarity switch. The power switch now is just On in either direction and doesn't do anything involving polarity or grounding. The standby swicth used to be just a mute, it didn't actually stand by. Now it really does cut the B+ voltage. The blue, hard to find replacements for multisection electrolytics capacitors are from Ted Weber. The speaker on the left was shot and had to be reconed. Neal's Speaker Service of Sacramento California did an excellent, exacting and meticulous job. Input wires are shielded now. Almost every single part in the whole amp is replaced. I didn't have to, and probably never will again, I just felt like it. Taking a tip from Randall Aiken, I went for polypropylene caps, metal film resistors but stayed with old standby Sprague bypass caps. I destroyed the original reverb transformer trying to figure out what was wrong with it, so this is a replacement. The reverb still sounds like a screen door spring. Basically, there's a section missing that would cure it. I am torn between using the orphan triode section for that purpose or using it to crank up the gain for overdrive purposes. I am leaning towards reverb, I have enough overdrive amps, time for something different.
The replica back covering is close enough that it doesn't jump out at you.
