Building A Tweed Bandmaster part 1.

The tax man was berry berry good to me this year so I decided to spring for a Weber amp kit while I still had the dough. To tell the truth I'd been thinking about doing a tweed Pro for a while but scraping up the cash to do it was always something of a problem. So after some looking around and comparing price to speaker area I decided to build the 5E7 Bandmaster clone, mostly because it was the same price as the Super and cheaper than the Pro. It had one extra speaker and a cabinet that can accommodate a fifteen inch JBL if I ever latch onto one.

With shipping the entire kit cost me $661 even and it arrived in about three weeks. Inspection revealed that they'd shipped it with a Heyboer power transformer  ( a nice touch) but that someone at the cabinet shop had jackassed the handle significantly.

Weber doesn't provide any technical information, I guess they figure that if you're not smart enough to figure it out you'll soon learn without a lot of handholding. It's a midwestern point of view which I happen to approve of. All the components looked pretty reasonable except for the pilot light assembly, the octal sockets and the wire. As it happens I had enough good stuff to replace these items. Whaddya gonna do?  It was three hundred bucks less than the competition.

The folks at Mojotone publish their build manual for the tweed Pro which is about the same thing so I was covered there. Weber publishes a nice layout diagram and thereby hangs a tale.

After some thinking about it I proceeded to start by dry mounting the components on the eyelet board. That took a few minutes.