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My repair on a 73 Fender Deluxe Reverb Silverface

Distractor_Beam

New member
Joined
May 6, 2020
Messages
1
I had a 73 Fender Deluxe Reverb Silverface with scratching, humming, and mostly popping noises coming from it.

I did a repair including:

Replacing the rectifier and power tubes
Replacing the negative bias cap
Replacing the filter caps
Replacing the main grid caps
Biasing it
Replacing the vibrato speed pot and knob

I don't know if it'll help anyone around here, but if anyone's interested, I made a video:



 

corpse

Well-known member
Joined
Jun 9, 2007
Messages
4,876
It is a great deal of work to keep those old girls running- but I feel, well wroth it. They are not BF but they are still fantastic. I had a '69 with the same specs and sold it to help pay for a blonde Bassman. I miss that amp- plus I could put it in the back seat of a sedan easily.
 

agogetr

Active member
Joined
Jan 22, 2019
Messages
451
yes early seventies fender amps have a bad reputation but i have plugged into some that sounded great. the worst part of them was the cabinet construction and the paper thin tolex they started using. i have beefed up the cabs with extra boards (mainly on twins!)
the last one i had was a mint 73 deluxe reverb i popped it on ebay and when i mailed it out it was celine dions guitar player that bought it in vegas.
he said he would never see it, it would be under the stage when he used it! super nice guy.
 

corpse

Well-known member
Joined
Jun 9, 2007
Messages
4,876
That's funny- I sold mine to the keyboard player (a hired gun) for Zak Brown. He had a pic taken from the stage at the Hurricane Sandy Relief Concert in Central Park looking out a 100,000 people- a view I will surely never have.
 

agogetr

Active member
Joined
Jan 22, 2019
Messages
451
That's funny- I sold mine to the keyboard player (a hired gun) for Zak Brown. He had a pic taken from the stage at the Hurricane Sandy Relief Concert in Central Park looking out a 100,000 people- a view I will surely never have.
an amp like your 69 is as good as any. i have a love for the early silverface stuff, they say circuits were changed when cbs took over but im not sure it was for the worse on some of those models.
i have a blackface princeton reverb that needed tuned up. the amp tech was this drunk guy and it buzzed real loud when i got it back so i found this young dude repair guy and when he gave it back he told me it had been wired with missing resistors which he corrected. then he showed me the schematic he used and it was for a later silverface amp. he silverfaced my blackface!!! i was polite and paid him the 60 bucks and just took it home. and... it sounds like a million bucks! go figure.
 

Joth

New member
Joined
Nov 5, 2018
Messages
4
The good news is that there's really no difference between a BF and SF princeton reverb, so he couldn't have changed it too far.

I have restored countless SF amps, some just a recapping, and some as extreme as a scrapped partial parts chassis only rebuilt to a full amp. They have always rewarded me for my efforts. The three main differences from BFs where they are criticized-

-weird powercathode/bias/phaseinvertor mods in the late 60s early 70s, different mods on different models at different times, bassmans being the worst examples. These are easy to reverse the circuits and are the effective candidates for 'blackfacing'.

- cabinet construction quality declining from a)fingerjointed pine+ chipboard baffles to b) staple+dado jointed plywood and dadoed in chipboard baffles. These require a bit of reworking to turn back into cleat mounted plywood baffles like the BF cabs, but entirely necessary once the chipboard disintegrates.

- ultralinear output configurations, these are the higher power versions of the larger 2x6L6 and 4x6L6 amps, I dont see the point in criticizing these, they sound great, and as reliable and easy to work on as the earlier models tho their wiring does appear alot messier. I warn that these shouldnt be 'blackfaced', as that requires a full rebuild of the phase inverter, bias circuit, adding of choke transformer, removal or mastervol and pullboost, reconfig of the power socket wiring, and even then the powertranny specs and powertube voltages are higher than blackfaces, giving an inaccurate result, so why bother?
 
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