First up is my Sunn Alpha 212-R amp. This is the amp that I recorded my album with. I'm partial to it since no other amp I've played has exactly, "my sound" like this one does. This amp was built in 1977, so I've repaired/replaced a few things on it. Lately I'd noticed the grill cloth was near the end of it's life. So I decided to improve the grill cloth in a few ways.
First up is the "before" photo of my amp.
And here I have it laid out for repair.
Next I removed the grill.
You can see some of the dings here.
Here's the back of the grill.
Say, do you think they put enough staples in the corner?
Just kidding. I understand why they did that. Next came the fun, and by fun I mean tedious part. Pulling out all the staples. Again, it's not hard, just time consuming.
Boy, that has seen some wear hasn't it?
I bought the old style Marshall grill cloth to replace the old one. I know purist would say I should replace the original grill cloth with an exact replica, but let's be honest, no amp is original. Caps, resistors, and tubes are replaced all the time on amps.
This amp has had a fair amount of work performed internally plus the speakers have been changed. All in all it's a much better amp than when I bought it. Since I'm going to keep this one until I die, I'm going to customize it the way I want.
Next it was time to staple the grill cloth on the grill. Like I said before, it's not so hard as it is time consuming.
There, now that looks pretty nifty. Let's install it on the amp.
Wow! That looks even better than I thought it would. I'm really happy with this.
So now it's time to move on to my next project. My Laney GH-100-L amplifier head.
Now there's a large backstory to this amp. Luckily I wrote about it years ago when I bought it. Here's the links:
New Broken Amp Day
New Broken Amp Day, Part 2
New Broken Amp Day, Part 3
The Amplifier is a Foot!
The short version of this story is that, I took a broken down Laney amp and got it working again. However, there were two things I never got around to. The first was finding a handle that was the right size. The second was to put a vented backplate on the back of the amp.
First things first. I took off the old Fender sized handle and installed a "British" style handle.
As you can see the Fender handle was too small. It left no room for me to wrap my fingers underneath the handle. So it came off, and the new one when on.
Well, that's the short version of the story. The new handle wanted to fight me the whole way while installing it. That, and the receiving piece on the underside of the amp wanted to come loose. In the end I managed to get it working.
My next project was to install the mesh to protect the tubes. As you can see the backplate is completely missing.
So I bought a "cut it yourself" mesh to fit. It should be noted that the mess is insanely sharp, and cut my fingers completely up. I was aiming to show a photo of my hands on here, but blogger.com might now allow it. It might violate one of the rules on here, so I decided I'd just skip the gore.
My main point is that, if you ever aim to do this wear gloves. Bite the bullet and wear gloves. In the following photo you can see me measuring and preparing the mesh.
Here's the dry fit. After a bit of fine cutting work it fit perfectly.
Now was time to install a few screws to hold the mesh.
Boom! It was perfect! So I finally completed what I aimed to do four and one-quarter years ago. I want to note that all parts were bought from Mojotone.com. They are expensive, but everything fit as it should. I will say this, all parts were of high quality. I doubt I'll have any problems with them in the future.
So I feel right. I feel complete. I managed to knock a few things off my "to-do" list that I'd been aiming to do for years. Now it's time to rock out. Yes, I should really be one of those guys who spends more time playing, than he does on the computer talking about playing. Rock on everyone.
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