I made this amp for my son, Jesse, about a year and a half ago. Although I have 10 or so years of experience building car subwoofer enclosures, this was my first attempt at an amplifier cabinet. The material is paraply- an excellent material to work with, available at Home Depot. The baffle is really thin plywood. The speaker is a 12" driver that I found when I built my bassman clone. I'd like to replace it with a Jensen reissue or something similar. The more astute will notice the homemade chassis for the circuitry. This also started life as a product on Home Depot's shelf. I bought a piece of sheet steel and bent it around the corners of a couple of 2X4's. For the ends I just used a couple of small pieces of the Paraply to fill the holes. As cheesy as this idea may seem, it is extremely stable and absolutely quiet. It also was not an original idea of mine, as I stole it from a friend's old Harmony amp.

The circuit is a union of a marshall plexi-style preamp with a generic, cathode biased, push-pull 6BQ5 output section. I also added Hoffman's Hotswitch mod to the second input triode. With much help from the good folks at Ampage, i was able to troubleshoot a major design error : A plexi preamp and PI produces way to much voltage for the 6BQ5 grids, causing nasty distortion. I am still not happy with the tone, and I think my next mod will be the PT and a different preamp circuit, possibly the Soldano Atom 16. The covering is an aoutomotive tweed from Select Products and the grille material is plain old Radio Shack grille cloth.

Sorry for the low res pics, I hope to upgrade the images soon.