1968 Heathkit Combo Head

That's hip.

 

Noice.

 

Actually I had the bass version of that (my first amp) and those were only offered as combos - many ended up decapitated and made into heads. Mine was already just a head when I received it directly from the guy that decapitated it.

 

I always wanted to build a Heathkit or Dynaco kit. Now that I have the time they don't make them any more.

 

Very cool head!

 

Sadly, I think the good kits faded out with the fairly recent lack of interest in learning electronics outside learning as a profession.

 

H-M probably stands for "harmonic modulation" or some such hi-falutin' term.

Killer score!

 

120 Watts of SS power in '68? Killer amp!
I love the old Heathkit stuff.
We had a store in town many years (decades) ago.
I think that's where I honed my GAS skills.

 

Back in the dark ages a lot of guys I hung with had Heathkit gear.
Most of the speaker cabs ended up having the H's & K removed from the logo.
eat it

 

Now that takes me back! Don't make me get my soldering rig back out!

 

There's still a bunch of kit makers out there that produce quality stuff - mostly tube amps of course. Mojotone is a good place to look for them, as well here's a list of guitar tube amp kit makers.

 

Cool site! Thanks for the link.

 

In my early days my lead guitar player had his dad build him a 2x12 Heathkit guitar amp. The power amp section sat on the floor of the cabinet and delivered 50W from a pair of cathode biased KT88. The thing weighed a ton I swear!

 

Ahh...the good old days!
My band in 1969 used one of those for PA. We plugged a four channel Bogen mixer into the microphone channel and used two 2 by 12 horn cabinets along with a 100 watt solid state Bogen Challenger that powered two Atlas Sound Banshee horns.The cabinets were Heathkit and had decent components.
It was a pretty loud PA for the era although a tad lacking in tone. It got my voice over three guitarists who were using two bassman heads a man!

 

BYOC makes point to point guitar amp kits, no bass amps though. I've built 5 of their pedal pedal kits, truly idiot proof instructions and paint by numbers manuals. I taught myself to solder building the kits. They have a few bass specific pedal kits, the chorus is excellent. I also built a muff, flanger, tremolo, phaser, and compressor kit, pretty much all I can ever see using.
Classic Brit 50 Amp Kit

 

There was a recent thread on DIY bass amp kits:
DIY tube bass amp kits?

 

Nice find. The assembled unit was crazy expensive.

H-M is short for Harmonic Modifier, a fuzz that uses antiparallel clipping diodes. You can see it in the attached schematic.

 

I built one of these (bass combo) back in the day. Fun project, don't remember it sounding all that great though. Lots of farting sounds when pushing it loud enough to be heard with my band made up of other 13 year olds.

 

I built a few Heathkit amps back in the day. My first was the TA-16 which was a 60 Watt 2x12 combo. Never really knew if it was working properly but I didn't like the sound and it wasn't loud enough. Then Heathkit came out with the TA-17. If you purchased the whole package you got two big speaker cabinets each with 2-12's and a horn driver. It was roughly comparable to a Vox Super Beatle. I got the amp with one speaker cabinet which took me a week or two to build. The TA-17 sounded much better than the TA-16 so I was happy with it. Then the amp head got stolen from our rehearsal place and I had to get a replacement so I built two of these. My brother took up Bass Guitar and ordered the TA-38 120 Watt Bass amp. We spent a week or so building it and it really was loud as it says in the add. You could crank it up all the way and it still sounded solid.

 

I love how everyone use to tell you how many transistors and diodes a thing had.