Posted by Rick Hayes on October 2, 2012 at 10:40pm
Renown Amp Tune-upSo, you know the amp was a mangy beast, but playable with a good heart, when I first saw it. Scary enough that I was able to pick it up for $50. Before I bought it, I checked the obvious stuff, trouble with power cord or torn speaker cones, that was OK but the controls were very noisy and sometimes resulted in a short, breakup or feedback and the switching pedals were wasted, (the connections had been stepped on or something so they could not be inserted in the jack on the back of the amp). Old Peaveys have controls fixed on the face with nuts, rather than new amps that have controls soldered directly to the circuit board so that if you bump one hard, you can break it off the circuit board. So I hoped for the best.Today I finally found a block of time I could commit to taking it apart. The plan was to look it over and spray cleaner on the control potentiometers.Now, DO AS I SAY AND NOT AS I DO… there are lethal doses of electricity, stored in the components, that will melt a screwdriver or fry you, SO DON’T…. But I did and began to work carefully taking it apart. Reminder, disconnect the reverb wires and the speaker wires so you don’t damage them while removing the amp head. I didn’t touch anything inside, didn’t have to, it was very clean and I used a straw on a can of Radio Shack TV Tuner Cleaner which I have had sitting around for more than a decade, to spray the pots and rotate them to spread the cleaner/lubricant inside. I checked that all pots and jacks were secure and put it back together.Pots were smooth and action was quiet, when I rotated the controls- no scratching. Turned it on, plugged in, it worked but no reverb. Reminder, plug the reverb back in. The foot pedals were trash, as I said, but I can control everything manually. This amp has a feature where you can have both “clean “ and “dirty” channels on at the same time, I can control these with the respective control pots including turning one off altogether. Now, a one or two watt amp would be fairly loud in a living room, and this is a 160 watt amp, so, I set it very low and it sound good and healthy, I didn’t try it at stadium levels so I don’t know if there are any ghosts in the machine. But, I am happy with the way it came out. Wishful thinking turned into a great deal.
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