Kustom 100 Guitar Amplifier Repair 

I've fixed several of these old Kustoms... There's some fun charm about them.

I first saw this amp at a music store in our town in about 1969 and just thought it was the coolest amp ever! Never bought one, but it always holds a place in my heart/memory bank. So 60's.

Nice work!

You did well. Trouble shooting skills are key… and it looks like you’ve got em. Thanks for the video.

The cover over the reverb can sag and droop low enough to touch the delay springs. I also used an LED substitute for the On lamp so it would never fail again. The reverb is always on unless you put a plug in the reverb jack. Or use the reverb foot switch if one is available. On the more powerful Kustoms the hiss is unacceptable. The orange gumdrops with the polarity indicated are electrolytics. And be sure the connections to the reverb tank are not over the transformer. John Fogerty had a love afair with these tuck and roll amps.

I dig the uncle doug pointy stick action 😁. Very interesting. I was wondering what had come of this bad boy.

Rarely, especially in guitar circuits, are the transistor parameters tightly spec'd. The transistors of the day were probably +-50% or more on most of the parameters. Anything roughly equivalent should work, especially if the circuit is well designed.

Great video! Great job! Great history and description! As, other have said a nod to Uncle Doug (not even mentioning the cat!:) and I would say Also, Lyle of Psionic in your use of "adequately gauged wire" And, your humble, honest telling of mistakes made, as well as, your soft spoken, easy going descriptions ala Brad the Guitologist! I would be pretty sure you yourself watch many of the same channels I do. Not all are guitar or amp repair channels Like This Old Tony, Ave and others. Anyway, Loved the reverb and feedback demo! Subscribed right away! Not even sure what your channel is mainly focused on, as I am writing this before looking at your about info and other videos. I feel, after looking at number of views, number of comments, and number of subs, that I am lucky enough to have gotten in early on what I am sure is going to be an awesomely successful channel! Of course it took, by your providing the dates and, a little math on my part, of events on this particular repair video, about eighteen years to actually have been able to make this one! LOL! But, I think that things have come sufficiently together with your knowledge and ability and, of course, the all important, all powerful, and mysterious "RU-vid Algorithm" that it probably wont, and hopefully doesn't, take as long to put out another good one! Congrats! And I look forward to your future content!:)

Thank you! Bought a secondhand Kustom KG1. But this one is built in China. And it does not need a repair. I can talk and talk and talk, though.

Can you post a link to where you found the serial number/date chart? I bought my K-100 bass amp in 1970 and had a tech replace the two-prong power cord with a three-prong grounded cord (I was getting buzzed when I touched the power switch).

Unfortunately the realm of guitar amp repair is a very transient industry. Some of the work I've seen being done at a premium is bad enough to make your head spin. It's also plagued with many that possess a lot of valuable experience but are generally lacking in a fundamental understanding of what in the heck is actually going on from an electronics standpoint. You'd think it'd be the opposite case considering we have the internet to help us out these days but the signal to noise ratio on that information can be abysmal at times. There's great people that do it but there's a lot of goons out there as well (even on youtube) so trust but verify. Also, funny that one guy was trying to say that those BJT's were some kind of magical vintage unobtanium parts... In many cases a lot of these transistors are configured as such where their gain/special characteristics really aren't that important. You may have altered the characteristics of the input slightly with a newer transistor with different hfe/impedance but I mean come on... No ones going to notice or care and your result is WAY better than it not working at all. Putting that aside, good for you for figuring out the problem. You wound up falling back on some very essential electronics repair principles (thou shalt check voltages!) and some (not so) common sense. Great work and I'm looking forward to more videos :)