Sunday, January 24, 2016

Important Tips About Guitar Amplifier Repair

By Richard Martin


To ensure that guitar amplifiers produce the desired tone, they should be maintained regularly by experienced and qualified technicians. Consistent maintenance enables your amplifier to have a long life and high resell value. Repairing and preventive maintenance will cost less than purchasing a new one. Some of the tips on guitar amplifier repair one can use are discussed below.

Examine the filter caps frequently to ensure that they are in the correct state. When you notice any abnormality with them, immediately seek technical advice from a technician and let him/her replace the caps with new ones. The amplifier might fail to work as required if the caps are not maintained well. On the same, pay key attention to the big caps for they get faulty easily than the others.

Tube sockets should be tightened after using the equipment for close to five years. This task must be carried on by a qualified and experienced technician because there is very high voltage present. However, you can do it meticulously with a tip of screwdriver. During the tightening, you can observe to see whether there is any corrosion on the pins and halt it with squirt contact cleaner.

Scratchy pots should be cleaned thoroughly. Clean the access holes in all the potentiometers from inside the chassis and rotate them to clean up their tracks. Failure to this, you are forced to replace the pot entirely. You can use air blower to remove any dust, cobwebs or dodgy wires in the chassis.

Moreover, you should tighten all the bolts and screws holding the power transformer, back panel on the cabinet, the feet or glides, as well as the mounts of the chassis. If these bolts and screws become loose, the back panel will be vibrating sympathetically as the music goes on hence compromising the quality of the tone. You can get a toolkit to aide you in tightening of the bolts and screws.

Resistors will wear out and some other times fail in older amplifiers. Therefore, there is a need to replace them occasionally. When they are not replaced the amplifier will start producing sizzling and hissing sounds. One particular resistor that requires to be replaced more often is the 100k ohms comp resistor in the preamp stages of vintage fender amps.

Also, large resistors on the power stage wear out frequently because of the high voltage and heat which they have to deal with. They also have to be checked regularly and replaced with new ones to avoid any anomalies. The replacement of the resistors should be done by experienced technician to avoid more damage.

More importantly, determine the state of the tone circuit and coupling capacitors. To avoid short circuiting the entire equipment, please inquire from an expert about capacitors. It may be necessary to replace the faulty capacitors with the new ones. Make sure these match the ratings of the circuit.




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