Pretty cool

I went home after work for a couple hours friday and got the Corvette wrapped up so I could bring it with me for the weekend. Of course, I forgot my camera so I have no photos of it! I'm very pleased with the final result. It plays great, sounds great and looks fabulous. Those big old Grover tuners make it a bit neck heavy, but I think I can deal with that fine. The neck feels great, the frets are excellent, the Powertron Plus is pretty hot and I'm getting some interesting harmonics from the trapeze when I want, which is cool. The D slot in the nut needs a bit of tweaking, and I may need to fine tune a couple other things, but not much. I'll try to get some photos in the next week or so and post them here.


So last night I built the footswitch for my $100 Peavey Triumph 60. I cannot remember if I spoke of it here, but I picked up just the chassis on ebay for $103 shipped on one of those, put a bid in and figure you won't win deals. I won though. No tubes, no footswitch, no reverb tank, no cabinet. Guy said he thought it worked, but thought it might also have a problem. I threw some old tubes in it (2 X 6L6GC, 1 X 12AT7, 4 X 12AX7) that I had laying around and I knew to be good. Hooked up my Marshall 1965A cab and gave it a whirl (after a cursory visual inspection, of course).

From Peavey Triumph 60 amp

No footswitch meant it was stuck on the highest gain channel (Peavey calls it Ultra), but it worked fine with no pops, hums or issues at all. I sourced a schematic from the Peavey forum and, lucky for me, it included the schematic for the footswitch. I drew up my own annotated version and started gathering parts. I found a old three button footswitch on ebay that was ending soon and snagged that for $19.95 shipping inclusive and waited for it to get there.

From Peavey Triumph 60 amp

It arrived friday and I set to work. In gutting it, I was able to salvage the three SPDT (single pole double throw) switches, two of which I needed. The rest had to be bought and built up. Upon first completion, nothing was working right, so I took it back apart and realized I'd wired the diodes backwards! Short lead negative! Short lead negative! Short lead negative, dammit! Oh well, it only took about two minutes to fix that and then everything worked like a charm! I have around $45 in the footswitch. Apparently Peavey will build them for you at $75 plus shipping, so I did OK.

Pretty cool amp with lots of gain on tap. I need to mess with it for a while to find what sort of tones are available. I've wanted one of the older three channel Peavey's for a while and am thrilled to have found one on the cheap.

From Peavey Triumph 60 amp

While I was getting the various bits I stopped at a electronics parts store near me and really had a find! The guy turns up old tubes now and then and often prices them very well. I need to snap some pictures, but I got four mid 60's vintage American made Tung Sol 12AX7s new in the box (and even in the dislplay box!). $19.95 a piece! From what I can tell these usually fetch $80 per tube and up, so I got a helluva deal. I need to try one or two out in V1 of some of my amps see how they sound. Some claim they are the best sounding American made 12AX7, even better than the black plate RCAs that sell for stupid amounts of money.