Cheap and Cheerful: The Peavey Delta Blues 115

Those who know me know my weakness for anything with a fifteen inch speaker and a nice set of tubes. So I had a Delta Blues 2x10 here for some repairs last week and when repairs -of which more anon-were completed I liked the sound enough to go and hunt one down in the fifteen inch configuration, which arrived today. The idea of spring reverb, vibrato, and a 15 inch speaker was one I couldn't pass up for $380 all told including shipping. Quite a value considering that they're about six hundred or so new.

A little more experimenting with it should tell me whether it's a keeper or not.

The Delta Blues has the same chassis more or less as the Classic 30, and thereby hangs a tale. They're known for needing to have the tube socket pins resoldered because they're kind of weak. This is a bit tedious because of the way that the three (yes, three) circuit boards are connected with bare wire and folded into a U-shaped configuration. Here's what I mean.

As I recall this one had some problems with filament voltage not getting to the right place, and a little rework because the solder joints with the connecting links getting loose because of the amount of flexing I had to do to make the needed repairs.

The new-ish 1x15 amp arrived in very clean condition with a cover and some unnecessarily heavy duty casters which I will save for another project. Some of these amps are known for acoustic feedback through the reverb tank, but this is not one of them. It does have a very slight hum, and if I ever get the notion to take it apart it'll get some nice new F&T electrolytics. In the meantime I shall try some different preamp glassware.

Stay tuned.

UPDATE: The date of manufacture of this amp appears to be circa 2004, and the background hum was accountable to a brand new preamp tube. Mr. Hickok said no, so in the trash it went. . If you're so inclined, give homage to one Job Barnart, who patented the Hickok tube tester mutual conductance circuit in 1935 and founded an industry.

UPDATE 2: Wouldn't you know it? A week after this arrived I stumbled over a 1971 non master volume Twin Reverb for a great price so the Peavey is gone-at a profit too.

The Panther Tank And The Engl 530

From the fine folks that brought you the Panther tank-a great gun and frontal armor but cursed with a bad transmission, a gas guzzling engine that had the life span of a mayfly, and final drives that would puke if you looked at them crosseyed-where was I?

Oh. I remember. A friend of mine brought in an inoperative Engl 530 tube preamp-a nice piece of gear, but one in which the product support borders somewhere between weak and nonexistent.

The power transformer looks like a brick, but without all the endearing qualities of the said brick. The 6.3v filament circuit that runs the two 12AX7s is defunct. No voltage is forthcoming.

Over the last few weeks I have emailed Engl, the Weiss transformer people in Germany, and the alleged distributor of Engl parts in the US and what's uniform about all of these is that they do not respond to their email or phone calls. In fact they've treated the owner the same way.

A week or so later I managed to reach someone  at Weiss and they said no, they didn't have one in stock and they were having a hard time getting anyone over at Engl to respond to them. A (former) Engl repair center in California informed me that they'd stopped dealing with Engl because of similar parts hassles and the owner had two Engl amps deadlined for parts. Thanks for the good words, Jens. Velvet Distribution has not returned calls or emails at this date.

Maybe Engl could build a nicely designed product like the Panther, but it's no wonder why they couldn't move the ball across the goal line.

Donald Douglas said it best. When one of his design engineers came up with some super spiffy design for something, Douglas would impatiently say "Yes, yes, that's all very well. But how will it do in Peoria?"

That's something the Engl people ought to consider if they want to sell more than the odd amp or two here in the colonies.