The long format videos are valuable. As an electrical engineer trained in the early days of solid state (old) I am continually surprised out how much I learn and how much I’ve forgotten. And how much practice is required. You are a worthy successor to Uncle Doug.
On the contrary, these long theme episodes are the definitive format. Not only as a teaching session, but more importantly, a safety guide for those novice techs who lack the formal experience to avoid possible electrocution. Not to mention it affirms your rhyme and reason for the hourly fee(s); which are mostly due to safe disassembly, and reassembly. If the choice were mine, I'd opt for this format always. Then again, I don't have to edit the video. I hope that these continue in the future. I too have the Hakko FX951. I optioned it for the auto shutoff, and locking key card features as well as the overall performance of the station. Well done as always, Mr. Lyle.
Thanks for turning your 'last' Blues JR into a comprehensive How To. And have a wonderful trip to London. I dare you not to sing 'These Are The People In Your Neighborhood" to yourself at least once a day...
Many thanks for this, Lyle. I know you say you have shown it a million times but for some of us, we need repetiton in case I ever get the confidence to try anything like this on my DRRI and make the mods you suggest. Appreciate how thorough you are with these and all the videos!
Long format videos like this are so educational, with the average age of a valve amp tech hovering around retirement age, it is literally a capsule to save a dying art.
im often critical of you, but i really appreciate you doing one of these amps that you openly don't like. It's great to see stuff like this for us poors.
The first few of his vids I watched I thought he was being a d-bag, but the more I watched I realized he's not wrong with what he says, they're not opinions but objective truth and the truth doesn't care about your feelings
After repairing many (I mean a lot) of Fender Blues and Reissue series amps, I ask my clients to subscribe or at least research, on this channel, any amp they are interested in owning. There are always compromises in a particular amp but knowing what inherent issues you have or will have is very valuable information.
@@altcountyemoyea, I'm not so sure I'd have bought a new Hot Rod Deluxe a few days ago if I had researched them on here beforehand lol. I'm actually glad I did, though, because it appears Fender has possibly attempted to rectify one of their biggest issues - the 5w resistors burning the pcb board. They actually seem to have lifted them off the board finally, and protected the legs with cloth covers. I have a nice warranty so I'll stick with it and see how things go. If it still burns, I'll deal with that IF it happens.
Great to see you do another video on how to improve the Fender Blues Junior. Your previous videos on this amp were my inspiration 2 years ago to find one in order to make it as good as you can by doing all the work on it yourself. I've done all the basics on it, and then some including upgrading the rectifier diodes and an aftermarket tube board. The Celestion A type speaker was the last mod I have done on it and i am happy to say i might have one of the best sounding Blues Juniors out there. Thanks for the great teaching videos and I hope you do a few more Blues Junior videos in the near future.
33:41 concerning cleaning up the pin pads...No good deed goes unpunished. Nice of you to fix it though. We all agree I am sure, the $900 new (tax and shipping I assume) one pays to own these things should buy more. Glad I bought my Blues Junior used. I can use the $700 to effect repairs. It is a nice, small, relatively light tube amp so I still think it has its place in the guitar ecosystem, but I have seen more than one fail in performance. Once repaired, they have all been solid workhorses, so to all those Blues Junior owners, keep on keeping on.
"...FM, no static at all". Great song and this is another great video. My buddy has this amp and this video may come in handy for future reference. I already had to replace his reverb tank. Muchos gracias amigo!
Awesome, as always, I learn something new with every one of your videos. I have repaired the same USA BJ many times and realized after the last repair that the solder joints of the male blades for the OT can easily be fractured on the back of the board. I surmise it was from removing and reconnecting the connectors so many times. It was an intermittent noise problem that I found using a chopstick.
Really enjoy these long form videos. Ever thought about doing something similar for a long single video going over adherence to electrical safety standards, the most recurring rules that amp builder fail to adhere to, and how to make amps safer (if they are worth being fixed)?
I have a Hot Rod Deville and a Deville ML that I need to get all the preventative items you have documented previously done on...just got to find someone willing to do it BEFORE they fail! Thanks for the great video Lyle!
I wasn't aware of all these issues with this amp before I bought mine a couple of years ago. Fortunately, I got a good deal on a gently used demo model, so I didn't pay a ton for it. If anything goes wrong I may try some of these repairs. I do have some electronics background, but not a lot. I built an All American 5 AM radio years ago from a kit, so I'm sure that I can do a bit of repair.
Hey Lyle, another rock solid long form on you man. If you’re out of resistors or desperado, you could actually ground a filter note through a tubes plate resistor. Hope all is well with you and yours. Stay safe and have fun.
Hoffman Amps offers a Tube Board for the BJr which I used already a few times successfully. It is no PCB, more like a carrier PCB for the sockets and you need to wire directly to the sockets, but this also eliminates the chance of breaking one of the strands in those cheesy ribbon cables... Also Tube_Town has a replacement which is a mix of PtP and PCB.
Thank you for taking your time to do these, they are definitely very informative. I couldn't find the Hakko soldering station you mentioned as an alternative to the FX951.
Just a related comment - I love that A Type speaker... have two of them as my main speakers. Sometimes they are a little cheaper than a Greenback and have some of the same scoopy quality. Just FYI. Love the vids PA! Also love that you are connected to five watt world. That is a good pairing!
At 38:40, Lyle mentions the special pliers designed to put a nice rounded half-bend in component leads to form built-in standoffs; similar loop-forming pliers can be purchased for a pittance from companies marketing tools to jewelry makers, such as Beadsmith, Wubbers, Xuron and others, for typically about $15 to $25 at most. No need to spend over $100 on a specialty item like this that probably wouldn't get used that much unless you're doing electronics repair full-time.
I save my plastic leftover Asian carry-out containers for parts storage. ( I wash them!) The lids lock tightly and I'm assured I'm not all thumbs. But yeah, I also go looking for a part I dropped. And I drop many parts...I guess it comes with age. My shop floor is a vinyl composite (the cheap $hit)...so for some magic anomaly, the suspect part is never where I heard it hit the floor! Nice to know we are of similar mindset on these Blues Jrs.
It doesn't matter if the shop floor is laminate, concrete,, wood or industrial carpet squares: the part you dropped never winds up where you'd first think to look for It. Sometimes it appears to have migrated into another dimension, and there were occasions in my working career that I never did find whatever it was that I had dropped.
Another great video, thanks Lyle @PsionicAudio . How do you like the A type speaker in this amp? I just picked up a BJ loaded with a C-Rex, and it sounds like ass. No idea why people suggest them. Anyhow I need to replace the CRex with something. I have a Tone King Gremlin, it has a Celestion 870, the BJ sounds good with it, don't know what an 870 is since it's custom for Tone King. Maybe an A type is similar to an 870? I have a WGS ET-65, it sounds pretty good too, maybe a little too clean sounding for a BJ?
The bad EL84s and bad screen grids were what it came in for. Discovered the tube socket damage in the process. The bias resistors are to help keep that from happening again (and the amp sounds better biased sanely). The filter caps and input jack were preventative maintenance as they commonly fail on this model, even if these had not failed yet. Total billed time for the amp is two hours. If Fender built these right none of this would be necessary…
Maybe it's a common sense thing (what's that?) but can you explain more about why you shouldn't have the chassis grounded through the ground wire as well as the input jack? Is it just a noise thing or can there be other negative effects. Thanks and love the videos!
I love this kind of video. Thx! Btw these amps were made to go broken. It's a company philosophy to have things break eventually so people buy new ones. Capitalism at it's finest. A flatscreen tv of 1800euros might last less long.
You should see what the e-waste dumpster (a walk-in shipping container) in my small town looks like after only 3 or 4 days of drop-off collection. I have a video of it on my channel ---- It continually gets filled up with dozens of flat screen TV's old vacuum cleaners, audio-video and stereo equipment, and so on.. And yes, the occasional guitar amp, although so far I've only found solid state guitar/bass amps; but I did find a nice pair of old Heathkit tube'type mono blocks there a while ago..
For those screws like that one that are more difficult to reach and control, I try to have my daughter come over and start them for me. I'm 70 with arthritic fingers and still coping with poor fine motor coordination from a stroke a few years ago. I find her 40 year old girlie fingers are much better suited for that, plus it gives us a chance to spend some time together. Fortunately she only lives a few blocks away.
FYI - I agree with cutting any lead to length before solder, but for a different reason. Probably too anal, but reducing any sharp ends, reduces the potential for RF generation. Yes at guitar amps the potential for interference is minimal, but I sleep better at night.
I just ordered 10k 5w resistors. Going to hook up the multimeter and see how long one of these takes. You mention 10k 10w so hopefully this 5w is enough. 🤞
I repaired primarily solid state audio electronics for a living for 2 decades and it was not uncommon to find 1960's to 80's equipment where capacitors were installed backwards compared to the silkscreened polarity markings on the circuit board; and so you had to look at the schematic and trace it out on the board by eye and maybe take a volt meter to it to find out which polarity orientation would be correct. I've seen plenty of low value, low- voltage electrolytics installed backwards at the factory compared to the measured polarity of the circuit, which means that even if the reverse-installed caps don't let out the magic smoke, or explode, they usually go bad.
@@goodun2974 Steel mill....you drop a socket or something else there is only a river of water catching the hot scale, etc. You'll never see it again...
@@chipsterb4946 In evaluating the overall design, it’s clear the choice became, implement an op-amp reverb drive + recovery circuit and have an unused triode on a tube they needed anyway, or go with a tube driven reverb circuit and at a minimum, have to add one more tube. When the imposed constraint is making this a budget amplifier, the choice isn’t really a choice at all, when you’re looking at a $12-15 tube, $2-3 socket ,$20-35 reverb driver transformer, not to mention higher wind on the power transformer to comfortably accommodate another 300mA in filament current - VERSUS - a 50 cent 4558 opamp chip and less than $2 in associated circuit components. Make sense?
I'd guess that filling unused PCB through holes with solder at minimum guarantees that the hole plating won't oxidize, pit, etc. over time and become difficult to solder in the future.
why does my blues deluxe usa from 94 pick up cell phone tower frequencies? Can this be prevented somehow? Love the amp but cannot record it anymore due to said problem. thank you
Hey Lyle, I see you left the heater wires on the PCB rather than moving to the sockets as you often do. Is that not needed on the BJ, or just not cost-effective? thanks
A) The radial caps used in this amp are much higher quality than the axials B) The radial caps here are low voltage but rated for higher voltages than present, so they should last a long time. I rarely find bad radials in these amps.
Luckily even quite high DC voltages are usually not life-threatening because ventricular fibrillation of heart is most likely caused by 50-60 Hz AC voltage causing AC current through body, not DC. I have tasted both quite high AC and DC voltages and I can assure that AC voltages are very unpleasant and dangerous. DC voltages often make you only change your underpants, as happened to me when I last time touched a electrolytic cap at 300VDC.
@@PsionicAudio 12VDC cannot kill you. Seriously. In army relay corps in the 80's, we got appr 30-60 VAC to between our both hands as a initiation rite, just to make things clear about voltages. It was quite unpleasant and even very painful but nobody died. Shaken, not stirred. 😁 You can connect 12VDC to your tongue and it just stings a bit.
High current low voltage DC can certainly kill you. Fortunately we’re not great conductors. But my point is I don’t want someone reading this and thinking the DC in the amp is safe. It’s just safer than AC.
@@PsionicAudio You cannot usually get high currents out of low voltages (ohm's law) because of quite high normal skin resistance, if skin is not sweatty or otherwise wet.
Sometimes with traces on both sides(or multi layered boards) a trace needs to get from one layer to another. An eyelet is used to connect the two traces. It looks like a perforation, sort of. Maybe that's what you are seeing?
I am very ignorant in this subject matter. However, I know what I am watching is artistry. Slowly, but surely, learning little things here and there. Does anybody know anything about the RANDALL BLUESMAN 4x10. I inherited it. I called Randall and they didn’t even know it existed! Any help is appreciated.
Lyle, love your channel. Thank you for all of your content. Any chance of making a video about how someone new to amp repair/servicing/upgrades might get started? I'm in Australia and not too sure how to break into the field. Thank you, Bob
Thanks mate. I’m the wrong person to ask as I fell into this by accident and what’s worked for me is not, in retrospect, any kind of plan. Reach out to Brad Webb (brad’s guitar garage) or Jason Tong (headfirst amps) down in Oz. They’re great guys/techs and they’ll know the factors to consider in Australia (parts cost is a huge issue).
The circuit and its faults are the same for all versions, except the most recent cathode biased examples. The first ones had one extra cap the later ones omitted.
I recently had the same tube socket issue in a 2003 Pro Tube Reverb. Funny thing, it was on V6, not one of the power tubes. Also lots of bad solder joints throughout the amp….. This was an amp I didn’t even know existed, much less had my hands on. Definitely could not recommend this model!
Some non polar capacitors should also be installed in a particular direction - ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-BnR_DLd1PDI.htmlsi=NSh1ewRwmiZ-R8tG
