Recent content by Marty Hewes

1967, at 13. My hands were too big for guitar, and I liked the power of bass. Bought my Hofner 501 in London in 1970. I still have it.

Totally agree here, I own a couple of each (and then some). I primarily play a Fender passive Jazz 5, for two reasons, I like to thunder, and I believe my job is to fill out the bandwidth (the mix) below the 80 Hz (low E range of the guitar) to fill out the spectrum, instead of getting lost in...

I won a bid for a palette of stuff that was apparently stuff PayPal got stuck with from guaranteed deals gone bad. Among the stuff was a Squire 5 string Active Jazz. It's the sunburst one hanging over the M3 in the pic on the left. I wasn't expecting much compared to my Fender MIM 5 string...

Unless it's small enough to clip to a mike stand so the controls are in front of me, I don't see much point. I'd be afraid I'd pull it off the top of the speaker. That reminds me, I picked up a little practice amp for a few bucks at Goodwill. Typical little 15 watter with an 8". The funny...

Actually, why I currently play is partly charity work. I'm getting back into it after a lot of years being too busy, living in a new town where nobody knows me. So I'm playing with the adult group at Rock Central, a not for profit music school. When the adult group gigs, we don't get paid...

Sorry, gotta vent. Rant mode on :). Why do I feel like I'm bustin' my a@@ to get this right, and nobody notices if I do (but the band sounds great). But If I lose it and drop out, the whole band falls apart, and probably doesn't even know why. OK, I play bass because my hands are too big...

OK, here's another update. The super duper Allen wrenches from Home Depot didn't grip. The Speed Outs didn't do it, one was too small to grab, the next one up wouldn't fit into the neck. Tried EZ Outs, the 1/4" spun, the 19/64 wouldn't fit. Tried pounding in a 5.5mm Allen, wouldn't go. I...

I like your approach. I wonder if this StewMac rod Item # 0968 would work in there with some variation of the Fender nut? I'd be leery of trying to build up the thread area and re-cutting the threads. I'd think the heat would change the hardening of the steel and likely lead to failure. I'd...

I'm playing a Fender MIM Jazz 5 string. The action is a bit high (higher than my Squier Active Jazz 5) and the truss rod Allen head socket (head end) is stripped. The truss rod adjustment didn't seem to do squat before I stripped it trying. I figure it's time to replace the truss rod or go...

I picked up (cheap) a 400B, apparently late 1981 vintage, (no, it's not the RB, earlier, a somewhat different beast) at a pawn shop a couple years back, they said it hummed. I ordered up some replacement electrolytic power supply capacitors, ready to go in, soldering iron in hand. The GK...

Sorry, can't leave this one alone. Not sure if I've been impressed with intelligence or baffled with B.S. here :). Of course you'd have to know the engineering specs on the caps that are in your amp, and you'd have to know that the caps were actually meeting their specifications, which...

Let me clarify my position a bit. The B20 is an extreme case, because they, (probably naively in 2007, they should have known by then, strike one), used a batch of cheap caps that happened to get caught up in the dielectric problem. Quality engineering was marginal, but good quality...

Usually diagnosing an electronic failure requires knowledge of electronics, reading schematics, and some test equipment, but this was an easy diagnosis. These are the caps that I removed from my B20. If your caps look like this, they have failed, and likely blew your fuse. They need to be...

Regarding the cost to repair this amp, if you have some spare time and can do the work yourself, the better caps and replacement fuse should cost about the cost of a few beers. I bought the amp, not operational at Salvation Army, for about 28 bucks (hey, it's a good cause, and I thought it was...

All you have to do is read this thread to see that these amps are suffering capacitor failures left and right. I'd occasionally see filter caps fail back when I started repairing amps in 1969, even in one of my Fairchild 260s, high end stuff. Saw a few when I was a bench tech at Pacific...