Practice Amp Revival

This is the Johnson Reptone 15, a combo amp with a vented 6.5" speaker for guitar practice. It's an inexpensive little number that actually looks pretty nice if you dig green. It has a jack for headphones and one for a distortion switch, which I thought was pretty nifty. Those knobs are for gain, master volume, and three equalizer adjustments.
I found one at my local gear shop for $20 used. Apparently the previous owner had stepped on their cord and snapped the plastic input jack. They even tried to glue it back together with less than stellar results. So, I snatched it up and decided to fix it up for my ladyfriend who was interested in learning the electric guitar. A new metal jack from Rat Shack was all I was going to need to get her going again, but, as the fates would have it, such was not the eventual outcome of a simple repair job.

I opened her up and found a pretty basic single transistor circuit with switchable diode distortion. I have to confess here that my knowledge of electronics is less than adequate to describe much else about the amplifier component. I can solder and use a multimeter, but beyond that and I'm mostly in the dark, unfortunately. But, in this case, it wasn't my ignorance that screwed me. No, it was impatience, naturally. In removing the PCB from the faceplate, I somehow managed to rip out two pot shafts. Yes, after doing it once and realizing my mistake, I did it again. You may point and laugh as you like.

Anyway, the pots were tiny surface mount things that took me quite a while to find on the internet. I did manage to track them down for cheap and bought many different values for fated future fuck ups. In the interim, I decided that the tiny green cabinet with the tiny 6.5" speaker just wasn't what I was going for in terms of a present, and what rockstar worth his blood alcohol level plays 6.5"s anyway? I happened to have a cheap 12" hifi speaker that would have been destined only for the garbage if it weren't for its owner's ridiculous sense of experimentation so I built a whole new cabinet.
If you can't guess, that's her favorite band. Or at least it was at the time.The grill is a t-shirt stretched across a simple window brace. Yeah, that damn shirt was the most expensive piece of the project and I could have saved the expense had I not attempted secrecy with it. Apparently, she had an old shirt I could have used. Oh well, whatever.

The real bitch was trying to get the faceplate to mount to the wooden frame. I don't have an inside shot to show the mess I made getting it to mount at the correct angle. I will summarize the process: it was a major bitch and you can see the boo boo I made doing it on the lower right. But, good glue fixes everything. Except plastic 1/4" jacks.

The back is removable and I reused all the black plastic hardware cause I had it and it was paid for as was the black rat fur, which didn't come out as nice as I wanted, but it does the job. As does the woofer. I know," you never use a hifi speaker in place of a PA speaker", but in this low wattage application it keeps up just fine. The way I figured it, sure, the 12" cone requires more power than the 6.5", but should have a higher sensitivity to help make up for the lack of amplifier juice. If it craps out, it's no real loss. Actually, the 6.5" in its vented cab sounded okay, but I had the 12" and a bug up my ass to use it so there it is.

This is another one of those rare projects that ended with me pleasantly surprised with its performance the first time. Shit, maybe I'm beginning to learn something.The 12" naturally has a deeper tone that helps seems to help smooth a little of that bright nasty diode distortion.
Overall, not bad. And her cat hasn't scratched it to fuzz and splinters yet. In the future, if the bug returns, I may make a switch box for it. Maybe in the near future I'll have audio of it. Maybe not. We will see.