My home-made clone of a Trainwreck guitar amp
Starting a few months ago, I got obsessed with tube amp building and design. I became particularly interested in the ultra-pure designs and layouts by the late Ken Fischer of Trainwreck amps. These amps, when they appear on the market, easily fetch over $10,000. Their tone is pretty incredible: all overtones, warmth, and tube compression. The clean/distortion is controlled via your guitar volume knob. With no pedals in the signal chain, the signal path from guitar cable to speaker is the shortest and purest I've ever seen in a fully-featured guitar amp.
I ordered all the resisters and capacitors with the main board and chassis. The transformers, assembly, wiring and soldering came later, once I had collected all of the various electrical components. The actual build took 4 days, thanks to the schematics and layout photos that served as bathroom reading material for nearly 2 months.
The tubes were sourced from ebay. The power tubes are 4 GrooveTubes EL84S. The V1 preamp tube is a NOS Mullard ecc83S, V2 and V3 are both NOS RCA 7025 tubes.
I built the cabinet with alot of help from Micah. I was going for a surfboard feel with the wood, which is all pine with a very high-gloss urethane coating. Jeesaw found the grill cloth in her stash of vintage fabrics. I used my soldering iron to woodburn the faceplate controls. All Trainwrecks have a unique animal burned onto the faceplate, so I chose to put a dog on mine.
