Vintage Kustom Amp & Cab can YOU help DATE it ?

"Whats it worth?" or "How much would you pay?" Threads!!!

 

I'd put money on it being a 1969. Take the question about it's value out of your inquiry and you might get some other responses.

 

Well, I think it's definitely a guitar head, ( Speed and Reverb ), and possibly a PA cab; that top driver is kind of weird. They did make a 315 bass cab, though. I would say late '60's ?

 

It’s a guitar cab. ‘69. The horn was good for making Angel Food cake.

 

I think it's a 69 also... I had twin 2x15 cabs back then and I remember that monster.

 

I remember seeing the cab with the big round horn in ads, but I never actual heard one. From what I know about horns, it looks like it would sound horrendous. A 15" conical horn...made out of aluminum? (And not even heavy cast aluminum like a professional PA horn.) It does look like a pretty serious compression driver, though...I had always suspected that it would be a tiny driver like you might find on a little paging horn down at the drive-in.

I played in a band with a guy who traded in his Bassman for a black Kustom 200 bass rig with the 3x15 cab. I believe that would have been in early '69. The singer in that band got a 200 model in the blue metal-flake, but he got a pair of the 2-15's boxes. It didn't take us too long to figure out that those boxes made much better PA speakers than the Bogen columns we had been using, so he didn't get to use them much for a guitar rig, which had been his original motivation for buying them. One good thing about that first generation of Kustom amps--other than the groovy upholstery, of course-- was that they all had pretty decent castors on them. In retrospect, the boxes probably weren't all that heavy in the first place, but the castors really made it easy to schlepp them in and out of gigs.

As players, we didn't have all that much respect for the brand. I mean, they worked, and they were durable...I'm not sure I ever saw one blown up, for instance, even with what were probably insanely low impedance loads. But the sound never really sold me...we all lusted for Fenders and Marshalls back then. Then Peavey came along and captured a substantial segment of the market and Kustoms were pretty quickly demoted to lower-tier status. At least in my eyes, and in this part of the country...and some of that may have been due to just one particularly successful dealer who blanketed central Texas with Peavey products.

 

We had a PA that used Kustom speakers much like this. (FWIW, we had a 5 piece horn section and the PA sounded great, if memory serves). Later, I appropriated one of the columns to use as a bass speaker - drove it with a B15-N head, and it was the bee's knees. At least at the low volumes we were playing at.

 

Two thoughts:


1. At least two of the drivers are replacements. None match.
2. Is that plywood support original? I don't recall plywood being used, or a bracket being there (but it's been a long time).

 

In the 60's our lead player briefly borrowed the 2/15 Kustom cab with horn on top. He was very, very loud.

 

If you want to date it you have to first ask it’s father for permission and then chose a fancy place to take it! LOL

 

I'd say that it's earlier than a '69. Maybe a '67 model. Those heads have "By Ross Inc." at the bottom center. Later ones don't have that, and they have a wattage number ("200," "100," etc.) underneath the Kustom logo.

The cab is a guitar/organ cab. Gosh, can't you just imagine how horribly piercing that police car horn is? Yeowww. (Loved the angel food cake mold comment.)