This will (hopefully) be a clone of the mighty Fender 6G15 tube spring reverb unit. You know that slapback drippy springy reverb sound all over surf and rockabilly guitar recordings? Well this is the reason.
My last kit build went well, and continues to go strong, so I got this kit from Weber too. They call it the 5G15.
https://www.tedweber.com/5g15-c-kt
This thingamajig goes between the guitar and amp, like a great big tube powered spring reverb pedal. It's about the size of a small amp head, and it is essentially an amp all in itself. It has all the ingredients to be an amplifier except a speaker. The spring reverb tank acts as the "speaker load". And like a pedal, it can be used in front of any amp. Being a tube unit, I'm also wondering if it can act like a dry tube clean boost? I don't know. Time will tell.
So this is where we begin....
Chassis and board. I'm thinking this eyelet board will be too long and need to be trimmed. I suspect this is just a generic type board. Like my last Fender build, the brass plate will not be used. I will rig up a buss-bar type grounding scheme like the other amp, which works beautifully. That amp is silent. There is also some concern about ground loop hum using the old Fender circuit design now that 3-prong power cords and safety grounding is required. Two devices earth grounded being used together can present ground loops. But we'll see. I'm gonna buss bar ground it and maybe build my own ground lift option. More on that later.
Power cord, reverb cables, assorted wire, jacks, and tubes and small parts and shit. The tubes are a 12AX7, 12AT7, and a 6V6 - just like the reverb/reverb recovery in the Deluxe Reverb build I did.
Reverb tank, footswitch, caps, resistors, power/output/choke transformers, etc. I've already inventoried and verified the values of the caps and resistors. All is well. Props again to the Weber people for getting all this tiny shit right.
And the visually appealing part of the whole thing...the box it's all gonna live in. Because I live in a world of organized chaos, naturally this will not "match" anything else I own, so it's perfect. My amp kit build was purple and checker cloth. The wife picked the colors. She did it again. This time it's a more subdued gray with salt and pepper basket weave.
So this is ground zero. I still need to come up with a general plan of attack. I learned some things to do and not do from the last build. Two things right off the bat that need some planning are the transformer locations and heater wiring. The power transformer normally lives inside the chassis on these things. I'll need to figure out if it will fit that way and if I wanna even do it that way. I took some liberties with my last build that strayed away from the traditional Fender wiring scheme. It worked for that amp. This one is way more cramped. I used a Marshall style heater wiring for the other amp. This one might need to be Fender style with the heater wires flying over the top of everything. But we shall see. I'll do whatever I think is best and hopefully only have to do it once.
