Deluxe Reverb rebuild

October 10th, 2011. Posted in: Fixing/Restoring.

I’m very happy to say that my Deluxe Reverb rebuild is finally complete. I’ve wanted to build my own Deluxe Reverb for a few years now and I was going to purchase a kit, but ended up finding a silver face Deluxe Reverb on Detroit craigslist for cheaper than a kit would cost. The guy had described it as being in good shape, and an amp technician friend of his had recently replaced all the capacitors and converted it to black face. [the black/silver thing is basically this: This amp originally had a black faceplate, but then Fender was sold to CBS and they made various cost-cutting changes internally and changed the colour of the faceplate to silver.]

“amp technician friend” will definitely be a big red flag next time. The amp had the wrong tubes in it, drawing way too much current. The reverb and tremolo weren’t working, and the amp sounded like ass and made all sorts of crackling noises. But since I was planning to rip all of the wiring out and start from scratch, those things thankfully weren’t an issue.

Above is some of the original wiring. Lots of it had been melted with a soldering iron, and some components weren’t the correct value. Also, everything inside the chassis was coated with a horrible wax that CBS coated on the black circuit board, which ended up heating up during use and redepositing itself everywhere.

The broken reverb ended up being a physically broken reverb tank, and thankfully I had another tank in my junk-bin for donor parts.

Another fun surprise was finding dozens of randomly placed holes through the baffle, presumably drilled for some unknown reason. I filled these and repainted the baffle before I made some tolex repairs.

After removing all of the old wiring and getting down to the bare chassis, I could clean the last of the wax off and start building from scratch with new wiring and components.

After seeing how the wax got everywhere, I took all of the potentiometers apart and cleaned them. I also removed the wax from all of the circuit boards by melting the wax in the oven and then absorbing it off. I used “vintage style” cloth covered wiring, which actually has modern insulation under the fabric which ended up being quite thick and hard to dress nicely.

The cabinet and the rest of the amp cleaned up very nicely after removing the nicotine. But unfortunately the paint wiped clean-off the metal Fender logo as I was cleaning it, so I had to repaint it. This was my first vacuum tube project, and I really enjoyed it – everything is large and easy to see, and the circuit is uncomplicated, making it relatively easy to understand and troubleshoot. Very happy with this project, and glad it’s over. Despite CBS’s annoying changes, the construction of the amp was still very faithful to Leo Fender’s original design – an elegant and simple mass produced amplifier that was built to last, and sounded killer. The amp sounds great as a bedroom amp and even better at max volume, where it still isn’t TOO loud (especially compared to my previous amp) but can work in a band. Anyways, here’s to another 40 years.