That's what happened here. The first Bassman 50 just didn't have any muscle, so I decided if I couldn't have a real Fender Bassman I'd have to build one myself.
The first step was to acquire a chassis and I was lucky enough to find a new production chassis on fleabay, the why pay more store. I already had, in no particular order, a Super Reverb power transformer from Pacific-nice stuff!-a Marvel choke, and a Classic Tone output transformer.
In short order I cooked up a circuit board from the usual stuff, punched out an extra hole for a rectifier tube, and commenced.
After some off and on work the Cowpoke as I called it was finished but still needed some fine tuning in the bass channel. Other than a tube rectifier it's pretty much all AB165 Bassman, and it was wired with traditional cloth covered pushback wiring, Omron octal sockets, and a mix of yellow poly and brown chiclet capacitors from China Inc-they were cheap at about ten cents apiece and do the job just fine, thank you.
For glassware it has a Raytheon 5V4, a pair of vintage Sylvania STR387s, a JJ ECC81 and a trio of JJ ECC83s. After trying it out I had to rectify a couple of mistakes I'd made with the wrong value caps in the bass channel.
That was all finished up today, the Bassman face plates were installed and in it went to make nice with the Weber Silver Bell that's in the J.D. Newell cabinet that I acquired a while ago.
You do not have to keep a Bassman power transformer in stock if you will but keep a Super Reverb/Pro Reverb power transformer. Just cap off the rectifier tube 5v winding if you don't like it. Stock one instead of two.
It's a good piece of kit and I will be experimenting with it and getting familiar with its Bassman goodness in the next two weeks or so.
The pictures.
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