Deluxe Reverb Rebuild (2011)

A spotted this vintage Deluxe Reverb on Detroit Craigslist while I was still living in New Zealand. I had a large 60W amp back in Canada with a Marshall 4x12 cabinet and knew it was too big for the apartment we'd be moving into. I had played through my friends' Deluxe Reverb and really liked it, so thought this was perfect. The price was great, the only problem was that the description said the amplifier wasn't working.

At the time, I didn't know anything about tube amps. I wouldn't be able to find and fix the problem, so I decided the best thing to do was to completely strip it and rebuild it from scratch - like it was a kit. Once I had the amp totally apart, I used the opportunity to disassemble all of the original potentiometers and clean them, clean all of the tube sockets and jacks and to bake the humidity out of the waxed fibreboard that the circuit components are built on.

The cabinet also had some problems, random holes needed filling and repainting and the tolex was coming off in several places. After I was done, I had a working Deluxe Reverb amplifier with all new resistors capacitors and tubes, ready to last the next 40 years. I also learned a little bit about how the amps function and how they're built.

Soon friends started asking me to fix their amplifiers and eventually I started a business repairing tube amplifiers, repairing over 100 amplifiers from 2014 to 2023.