1 / 4 Tweed Deluxe Clone
2 / 4 Tweed Deluxe Clone Back
3 / 4 Tweed Deluxe Clone Chassis
4 / 4 Tweed Champ Clone
5 / 5 Tweed Champ Clone
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Tweed Deluxe Clone #2
This is another Mojotone Tweed Deluxe clone that was gone over thoroughly.
It's a kit amp that was also built in amp building class.
The buyer noticed some issues.
At home his lips tingled when he touched the mic stand.
On stage, the volume was really hard to dial in. There was a big jump in volume at about 2.
Lips tingling is usually the death cap, but surprisingly it was missing and the switch was unused.
Next was to check for ground issues.
It had a ground strap across the pots with some of the ground lugs on the input jacks unwired.
That's not a big deal.
But a simple tug on a ground wire to move it caused it to pull out of the solder joint!
A few more tests found another unsoldered ground wire at the other side of the board.
There were other simple issues.
One of the Keps nuts on the power transformer was too large.
The speaker connector was missing the plastic sleeve inside. Some electrical tape fixed that.
The AC wiring was brought up to current spec.
The grounds were moved from the bolts to the chassis.
The ground scheme took some thought.
The first input cap was grounded to the chassis so that it was isolated from the preamp ground strap.
Update
The amp came back bacause it was too noisy.
It quieted when touching the metal chassis, which meant grounding issues.
This took some time to figure out since it had upgraded grounding and was fine in the shop.
It turned out that the AC cord was faulty.
The continuity check on the Fluke changed tone when the cord was moved.
There was a big crimp in the strain relief, probably because vice crimps were used during build.
There's a special tool for strain reliefs, but a pair of pliers works (if you're careful).
Another update
The owner came back with a crackling issue that happened sometimes.
The chopstick test was done randomly and one of the heater wires came loose.
It wasn't soldered onto the lamp, even though it looked fine.