Matchless Spitfire guitar amp clone

Small progress.

Machined delrin into feet for the amp. I had lots of vintage feet but none were tall enough to clear the handle on the speaker cab.

And made some knobs

Zinc plated

Machined a panel for the grill and wrapped it in Fender oxblood cloth

Mounted the head to the cab with the piggyback hardware

And now as it sits as of last night

It is looking OK. There is still something a little "homemade" looking about it that I can't quite put my finger on. Once I figure out how to print a proper faceplate I think it will look a bit better to me. The Toner transfer method isn't working out.

I am going to talk to the sign shop guy in my shops parking lot and see how small he can cut vinyl letters. Perhaps a back painted lexan panel?

That looks fantastic.

I feel like Lexan's going to look "plasticky" on such a classic-looking amp...

Seems like there are some manufacturers of reproduction decals for old radios and so forth; poked through that stuff for a usable scale? I wanted to give a concrete link, but haven't gotten to wade that far yet.

Billy Zoom makes it look good on his "little Kahuna" unit

I would have to be a better graphic designer to pull it off though.

Yeah... Billy Zoom manages a lot of stuff I can't.

My mom was into making cards and rubber stamps in the late 90s and early 2000s. She has this blue glue like substance that you apply (like with a rubber stamp), sprinkle black powder on it, then use a heat gun and it embosses nicely. You can get different colors but not sure how it does with stuff other than paper (like painted metal). But this is what I'm planning on using for my next tube projects; and hell I should do it to my old DIY tube projects, lol.

Here's the powder stuff.

Here's the 'glue' stuff.

You could go as far as get a custom made 1 thru 11 rubber stamp made up too. Then piece meal together 'Loudness' or other such labels.

There's got to be a low volume way to do this.

Vinyl that small isn't really plausible. I'll bet the old amps were silkscreened. You could also etch the metal or do a waterslide.

Also, you need some sort of badge on those cabinets. That might be why they look homemade.

This thing looks amazing. Nice work!

A custom decal on the control panel in old script or a simple vintage font would look cool. Maybe an old metal car badge could be repurposed for the mesh?

GUYS! GUYS! I figured out the sound problems!

The keen eyed of you might have admired the awesome vintage Ohmite resistor display caddy.

I found it at the Portland swap meet last year. It is still full of NOS carbon composition resistors from the 40's. I was stoked to be able to build a vintage style amp with vintage components. Problem is Carbon comp resistors drift up in value over time, sometimes a little and sometimes a LOT. I just read color codes and popped them in. It never occurred to me to test each one. I had a 2.2K 3 watt that had drifted up to 3.4K bringing the power tube voltage down 50 volts. A 1.2K 1 watt that was in the preamp signal to phase inverter path read 100K and was blocking most of the signal. There were a total of 6 massively off spec resistors.

I plugged it back in checked the bias and it is dissipating 15.3 watts. Right on target. Plugged a guitar in and dayumm it is BRIGHT! and LOUD. I pretty much immediately took the bright cap off the volume pot to tone it down. Sound is good I think. Thus far the master volume is... well.... gross. I will look into that.

So now back to mounting the chassis in the cab and cosmetics of the faceplate, for which I have a new plan

Jumper K. Balls wrote: Also my soldering station died so I ordered a new one. I don't recommend the Kendal 937D for this type of work. not enough wattage or something. Takes 4 times as long to heat these big joints.

The problem with those Hakko 936 clones and derivatives is the heaters run smaller than the real thing and the tips run looser than the real thing so you get crappy heat transfer from the heater to the tip. Genuine Hakko T18 series tips are supposed to help.