benadrian wrote: Mon Mar 17, 2025 3:51 pm

Frankie99 wrote: Mon Mar 17, 2025 3:10 pm OK, so this is a wrinkle I didn't expect - the next person recommended to me will also do a kind of side by side repair class while he works on your amp with you. This seems......pretty rad? Anyone familiar with this?

https://aventguitars.com/school.html

Seems like an insurance liability for the shop, but pretty rad other than that. This is kind of how I learned. The amp repair guy in Indy was nice enough to tolerate me hanging around and asking endless questions. Kevin Silva of Uncle Albert's amp repair, thank you.

When I was doing amp repair by word of mouth in the bay area, my least favorite part was sitting alone in a windowless room doing the work. Since it was mostly for my friends or friends of friends, I'd give them an choice:
1. pay for the parts and repair time
2. pay for the parts, bring me a burrito (buy dinner that would be way cheaper than the repair cost), and hang out while I fix your amp.

Almost no one took me up on the latter. Basically, they'd rather pay more than hang out with me. The whole thing just makes me sad now thinking about it.

I think I'm going to call tomorrow and see what the deal is. I would buy you a burrito today and hang if I could.

Nate Dort wrote: Mon Mar 17, 2025 4:04 pm I should start streaming my repair sessions on twitch.

Would watch.

I wound up reaching out to the guy who offers training classes - looks like I'll spend a day with him next week fixing my amp and learning. I'm very excited for this - one on one like this has got to be my favorite way to learn these skills. You tube/internet can be incredible, but real time feedback and troubleshooting together will be cool.

It's the OG filter caps in there. I can't believe the original tech didn't just replace them on suspicion. Oh well - I wouldn't have found this service otherwise, so I guess I can bright side it that way.

Would this be an appropriate replacement for the 2 big caps in my Mark 3?

https://www.amplifiedparts.com/products ... ectrolytic

Here's a link to the schematic.

https://el34world.com/charts/Schematics ... manual.pdf

Frankie99 wrote: Mon Mar 24, 2025 10:04 pm Would this be an appropriate replacement for the 2 big caps in my Mark 3?

https://www.amplifiedparts.com/products ... ectrolytic

Here's a link to the schematic.

https://el34world.com/charts/Schematics ... manual.pdf

Yes, that 50/50 @ 500V dual will replace the original 40/40 @ 400V Mallory duals (there's two duals in there). You'll just need to figure out a good way to mount them inside the chassis. This usually requires drilling out the rivets that are holding the originals and getting some sort of large plastic strap with a screw and nut.

Or, do what this guy did and stuff new caps inside the old shells: http://russelltechnologies.co.uk/traynor.ygl3.html
*don't actually do this, it's a bad idea for a number of reasons*

Yeah, I've read about people stuffing old caps for authenticity.

Rock and Roll is messy, with fucked up components, out of tune guitars, broken headstocks, etc. I don't want to mistreat gear, but I also ain't running a museum, I'm making noise. The sound matters, the appearance of the guts....while cool, isn't all that important to me. Ugly hammers still work.

EDIT - also thanks for confirming. Ordering now, I have my appointment for next Thursday with the tech I mentioned. He seems like a good dude, looking forward to it.

Nate Dort wrote: Tue Mar 25, 2025 5:49 am
Or, do what this guy did and stuff new caps inside the old shells: http://russelltechnologies.co.uk/traynor.ygl3.html

Highlight from that read:

Some guy wrote: "I don't really know why I'm doing this."

I bought some 20ft cables that I thought (or at least the product listing picture led me to believe) was 1/8” stereo to 1/4” mono (trying to run a stereo output from my iPad to play keyboard-style sounds into an unbalanced amp input). Cables arrive yesterday, lo and behold they’re stereo on both plugs. Guess I’ll just go fuck myself.

I put in a return request but I got to wondering—why don’t I just buy some spare TS plugs and heatshrink, cut off the 1/4” side and solder on the TS plug for my purposes? Any complications you guys can think of?

defendyachtrock wrote: Tue Apr 01, 2025 10:23 am I bought some 20ft cables that I thought (or at least the product listing picture led me to believe) was 1/8” stereo to 1/4” mono (trying to run a stereo output from my iPad to play keyboard-style sounds into an unbalanced amp input). Cables arrive yesterday, lo and behold they’re stereo on both plugs. Guess I’ll just go fuck myself.

I put in a return request but I got to wondering—why don’t I just buy some spare TS plugs and heatshrink, cut off the 1/4” side and solder on the TS plug for my purposes? Any complications you guys can think of?

I think you can buy your way out of this with a stereo-mono adapter. But does the stereo-on-both-ends adapter work as-is? I believe the ring portion will just not be used on your amp side, if I'm not mistaken.

Is anyone having issues with external USB drives not being mountable on Apple computers running Sequoia operating systems? Sounds like Sequoia has been problematic for users with usb drives. I installed Sequoia 15.4 on my brand new, two day old M4 Mac Mini in the hopes that the update would remedy my issue, but I was disappointed. The weird thing is that the drive worked on the first day I hooked it up, but I could only read from it (and not write to it). I booted up on Day 2 and the drive was no longer mountable. Did I accidentally set some preference that is causing this? The drive still works fine on an older Mac Book Pro 2015 running 12.7.6, so the data is still on there...it also shows up on the M4 Mini in disc utility, but is un-mountable.

twelvepoint wrote: Tue Apr 01, 2025 10:37 am

defendyachtrock wrote: Tue Apr 01, 2025 10:23 am I bought some 20ft cables that I thought (or at least the product listing picture led me to believe) was 1/8” stereo to 1/4” mono (trying to run a stereo output from my iPad to play keyboard-style sounds into an unbalanced amp input). Cables arrive yesterday, lo and behold they’re stereo on both plugs. Guess I’ll just go fuck myself.

I put in a return request but I got to wondering—why don’t I just buy some spare TS plugs and heatshrink, cut off the 1/4” side and solder on the TS plug for my purposes? Any complications you guys can think of?

I think you can buy your way out of this with a stereo-mono adapter. But does the stereo-on-both-ends adapter work as-is? I believe the ring portion will just not be used on your amp side, if I'm not mistaken.

I’ve had a lifetime of experiences with a wonky adapter—trying to turn it just so such that it actually makes contact to want as few moving parts involved as possible.

Far as actually trying the cable out goes, the signal coming from the iPad/iPhone/whatever is going to be coming out as stereo, so I’d be losing one stereo side of information with the ring either not making contact or being grounded out, if I got that correct. Theoretically I could put the device in Mono mode, but it’s something that iOS makes you search for in settings/not something that’s easy to find/something that’s easy to forget about in the heat of the moment.

In any case after a little more sleuthing I have found that the cord I want exists*—some made with resistors going between the Tip and Ring sides of the stereo plug summed into the Tip side of the mono plug to avoid crosstalk, but of course they’re dumb expensive.

*Yes Hosa makes this exact cable already—at least the cheapo non-resistor version—but no one makes ‘em in lengths longer than 10 feet.