Putting Life Back Into A Silvertone 1335

One of my old pals from Metuchen, the Bench, and Port Jervis runs on the Beezer has reinvented himself three or four times and now holds sway as an auctioneer in the Easton, Pennsylvania area.

He's a grand fellow and a superior auctioneer.

Anyway, he alerted me that this amplifier was coming up in a large estate he sold. As the story goes the estate belonged to two spinsters who'd decided to liquidate their late parents' estate, part of which included a wood shop that had been closed up eighteen years ago. The Silvertone was found under a pile of junk in the back of the shop. Between the purchase price and the shipping I was out about four hundred bucks. The shipping was a little pricey but the people who packed it did a good job so it got here in good nick.

It's an interesting circuit, mostly because of the use of the filaments of the two 12AX7 tubes as the power tube cathodes for biasing purposes. I don't know if anyone else has tried it but Nat Daniel always had some interesting ideas for circuitry.

As it happens I know this circuit pretty well, having worked on a number of old Airline amps that had the same or similar setups. It's good and clean for a while and the low headroom makes for pleasing tone.

I spent the better part of today replacing every capacitor in the lower chassis, and I'd previously redone the upper. They're all wax paper of varying makes and they were all likely to be bad. The folks at Danelectro didn't go cheap on the transformers-the power transformer is a Freed and the output is a Utah made transformer. The fifteen inch speaker is from the House of Rola.

The tubes were all pretty much garbage but I've got a good stock of glassware for these applications.

A good cleanup with lots of spit and polish got most of the musty smell out of it, and I'll give it a road test tomorrow or the next day.

I expect magic.

The fake wood grain shelf paper doesn't look too bad, although the original tweed is underneath. It's tempting.

UPDATE: It lives, but one channel has a lot of white noise-but since that's detachable I'll only have to pull the upper chassis. The vibrato didn't work until I remembered something and started switching tubes for similarly based numbers. It had had a 6AC7 which I pitched thinking it was a hole stuffer but maybe the last person in there installed it for a reason. A 6SH7 got the job done where the 6SJ7 on the chart would not. I may play around with power tubes as well. It still smells kind of musty but that's to be expected.