1955 Fender 5E9 Tremolux in near MINT Condition.....Wear a Bib !!

well greetings out there on youtube land and welcome to today's big video which features the contents of this relatively large and rather heavy box so without further ado let's perform the cesarean operation get it open and see what our mission for today involves well we have the box open and it looks like this is packed just about as well as an amp can be packed where it's surrounded by uh styrofoam okay so let's lift the panels out and see what a lurks beneath it looks like our curiosity will have to persist for another minute or two because it has some sort of a cover so let me lift the whole thing out we'll remove the cover and take a look and by ant mini's bra straps it's the darndest tweed tremolox i may have ever seen okay i'm gonna take the camera off the tripod so i can give you a close-up look at this thing and you're not going to believe it i was convinced this was a reissue of some sort but it's not okay we'll start here on the right side you see there's a tiny little scuff there in the tweed you can see the box joints coming through the tweed covering material look at the control panel it looks like one of those new ones you might get like from mojo tone okay spectacular gorgeous handle ah obviously keith richards had something to do with this okay um it's just it's just incredible look fender plate and this one's actually straight okay some of them are like a 20 degree angle flawless grill cloth wow let me turn this jewel around we'll take a look at the rear and also of the app well it just gets better look at this panels are perfect another look at the not the nicest tweed control panel i've ever laid eyes on gorgeous okay let's pull the upper rear cover get these out you know darn well they're going to be tubes and other things that are packed up and we'll take a look at the chassis look at the inside of the upper rear panel until this jewel has played some ferocious licks in its life look at the output tube heat um also the scratch and sniff asbestos sheet okay incredible before we look at the inside i just wanted to focus on the outside here this is one of the prettiest tweed cabinets look at the finish on this those of you who are adding like tinted shellac and other things to your recovered tweed cabinets uh this is the look that you want okay it's really not orangish it's just a beautiful sort of a very kind of a pale amber uh yellow absolutely beautiful finish and in keeping with the way everything else was wrapped the tube set here is you could drop this out of the plane okay over my house and after it bounced a few times the tubes would all still be usable i'm sure beautifully packed and also one other kind of a mystery pack here that we'll open in just a second now what we've all been waiting for a quick tour of the interior including a mint tube chart look at the serial number zero zero six zero and a five e nine circuit in a tremelux amplifier looks like whatever they originally printed for a rectifier tube they've changed it to a 5y3 let's take a look at that i wasn't aware they ever used anything else but we'll see and one last observation before we move on from the tube chart we see that it is rubber stamped e e which should be from the fifth month of 1955. so what that means is not only do we have a virtually flawless narrow panel tweed vibrolux amp here but since 1955 was the first year of issue for the vibra lux this must be the 60th vibralux amp ever built by fender okay i i find that to be very impressive this is truly a historic piece of musical equipment okay and uh let's proceed then with the utmost of respect and care to try to make it sound just as good as it looks and now here for our speaker what appears to be a completely original p12 jensen alnico speaker appears to be in beautiful shape let's take a closer look at it i want to get a little better lighting but now here's the odd part let's look at the chassis okay we see a what appears to be a replaced high wattage resistor but you see anything missing we've got our astron type am red paper wrapped capacitors like we're used to seeing but i don't see any electrolytic caps okay i think they've been removed and probably for a good reason so we'll have to investigate that also we see places here for our tubes so let's take a look in this pack here and see if we can get any hints about why those electrolytics are missing okay after unwrapping about two parsecs of green bubble wrap i find inside 25 25 cap sleeves and electrolytic sleeves now here's the deal also of course the three wire power cord to be installed uh the owner wanted me to recap this with the new capacitors concealed within the old wrappers okay so he's already gone through the trouble of extracting the old uh aluminum cased uh capacitors from these sleeves and he also cut the little end discs and painted them black so he's done a good part of my work for me and i really appreciate it so that's what's going to happen then we're going to recap this much like we did that princeton where when i get through recapping it hopefully uh you will not be able to tell that it has been recapped okay it's going to appear that those old-fashioned cardboard wrapped caps are still in place so uh i think it's time to get started and there you see within that heavily padded foam tube are the four cathode bypass caps just the housings ready to be stuffed with new electrolytics i was in the process of removing the chassis from the cabinet and i came upon one of those wonderful pieces of tape that we all look for in these swede amps it looks like lily to me and there looks almost like there's part of a letter beyond the y but l-i-l-y that's an unusual way to spell it but i could admit it doesn't look like loopy so apparently loopy had a cohort with the soldering iron and um she signed her name to this one okay so hats off to lily we'll have to try to see if we can't find more out about her here's a little hint when removing a fairly heavy chassis from a cabinet and especially when you absolutely don't want anything to happen to that chassis lay it down flat after you've loosened the nuts on both sides lay it down flat and then reach up inside and remove the nuts and and lock washer and then the chassis will rest on the tabletop you can just lift the cabinet off of it there's no wrestling with heavy transformers and all while you're trying to unscrew both sides simultaneously okay so this just let gravity be your friend okay and try it this way now i've lifted the cabinet up off of the chassis and we get our first glimpse at the original transformers this is a triad 8156 and the output transformer i don't really see markings on it which is fairly typical but i'm going to bet you it's the right one okay there we go now i'm going to set the cabinet in a safe place notice the offset of the speaker way over to the side to make room for the transformers okay let's set this to the side and uh get started on our uh chassis rewiring a couple little notes before we get started the original rectifier that was printed on the two charts at five e4 and they backed off to a 5y3 okay that's one observation the second is remember our serial number zero zero six zero well it certainly agrees with the serial number stamped on the chassis so this was probably the 60th one of these made god knows how many they made all told but this was a very early one really low serial number very impressive and and still like almost like new condition just incredible one more happy surprise is the number stamped on the perimeter of the 12 inch alnico speaker 220 of course is jensen and then we have a 5 and an 18. so this is from the 18th week of 1955. okay which should be early in the model year and may be part of why the serial number is only a zero zero six zero okay we're up here in the trusty uh chassis stand and uh i'm looking at this a two wire power cord and the bulk of it and the way it's soldered which is not really up to lily's standards i don't think makes me think this might be a replacement cord just doesn't look right to me so i'm going to unsolder it also it's wired wrong where the hot wire is going to the fuse and the neutral wire is going to the switch we don't do that anymore so i'm just going to unsolder it and get it out of the way for now and then we'll install the three wire cord later i went in the house and downloaded a schematic for the 5e9 tremolox circuit and as you can see they show a 5y3 rectifier this was drawn in the fourth month which is april of ee is 55 april of 55. according to the schematic that circuit used a 5y3 now looking at the layout drawn at exactly the same time april of 55 it shows a 5u4 rectifier but then as if to answer all our questions we see this note model 5e9 used a 5y3 gt rectifier instead of a 5u4 okay remember this is the 5e9a so the original first issue vibroluxes used a 5y3 instead of the 5u4 and that is exactly what uh our amp is it's an early issue so the 5y3 rectifier is correct also we see a second note early models have the tremolo switch on the depth control instead of on the speed control and when we look at the circuit in this tremolox we see this is the depth control this is the speed control you see the tremolo on off switch right here is on the depth control as it should be with an early version of the circuit okay so now we know uh where the missing capacitors go we'll have three big electrolytics here the circuit calls for 16s which are kind of hard to get nowadays so i'm going to use 22 microfarad at 500 volt f and t's okay now granted these are higher capacitance but if anything they should actually reduce the noise even better uh the by that i mean the 120 cycle hum and here we have our 25 at 50 volt cathode bypass caps so these are the ones that will be concealed within those external cardboard wrappers from the original uh filter caps while we're at it here looking at the schematic let's review uh and take a look at what type of circuit the tremolox used we see a rather unusual first preamp tube 12ay7 a dual triode similar to a 12ax7 but with lower amplification factor we have four inputs they appear to be wired equivalently and we see that the 12ay7 is not only cathode biased but cathode bypassed to maximize gain now we'll exit from the plates of the 12 ay7 preamp tube and pass the 0.1 microfarad coupling caps to a tone control and a volume control from them there is a single input to the 12 ax7 phase inverter top triad grid now this is a paraphase phase inverter now how does the paraphase inverter work well we see that since the grid was driven by our music signal and we have the output from the plate the plate signal is inverted when you drive the grid so we have an inverted signal here through the 0.02 microfarad coupling cap to the grid of the upper 6v6 but some of that inverted plate signal is going to be fed down here to the grid of the lower triode okay and the output from the plate of the lower triode will be double inverted okay we have the inverted signal here we invert it again so now it's back in phase so we have an out of phase signal to the upper 6v6 and in phase signal to the lower 6v6 we have our push-pull relationship through the output transformer primary which drives our 12-inch alnico jensen speaker now since the tremolox is essentially a deluxe circuit with tremolo added let's take a look at the tremolo circuit in this amplifier we see up here it involves both tryouts of a 12ax7 which is fairly standard okay as we'll see in fender tremolos you see the oscillation loop here is traditional 0.01.01 and 0.02 we can increase the value of either the 0.01s to slow it down okay we have our oscillation loop here and then our speed control which is in typical uh configuration will alter the resistance to ground and change the speed of oscillation we have the tremolo on off switch here which we know is piggybacked onto our depth control pot and over here we have the depth adjustment okay and we see that the output from the oscillation loop is fed into this second trial to the 12ax7 and the cathode of that second triode interacts more or less depending on the setting of the depth control with the cathode of the phase inverter the 12ax7 so what we have here is a cathode bias modulating tremolo by altering the cathode bias of the 12ax7 phase inverter we're going to increase or decrease the volume of the signal put out by the speaker okay and remember that tremolo is volume modulation high volume low just like you've taken the volume control part and turned it up and down okay so that's how it's done in this particular circuit right now it's time to stuff those old cardboard tubes that were removed from the original electrolytic capacitors as you can see the f and t's are a little smaller in diameter so the owner of the amp provided some foam to take up the slack and in this case as you can see i've used the black painted dowel of discs to fill each end there's no rattle because of the foam and um this then i think would pass muster as being an original astron mini even though it's really a brand new f and t 22 microfarad electrolytic cap now it's time to do the other two one little tip if you're trying this at home is to bevel the inner corner of the black disk to help you get it past the kind of a ragged outer rim here of the cardboard tube so that you can fit this in and then curve the cardboard back over it the beveling really is essential and now the three astron mini mites have been re-stuffed with a brand new 22 microfarad f t caps and they're ready to install also something i did in the princeton video was to mark the positive lead on each of the f and t caps just so that after i got them all together i wouldn't start having doubts about whether i might have transposed one inside the tube this way i can look and see yes their polarity is correct now the four smaller cathode bypass caps will be stuffed with the 25 microfarad at 50 volt of brand new electrolytics using the same technique with the cardboard tube a little bit of foam to take up the slack and the beveled edge disc pushed in after the cap has been installed okay here are the 25 microfarad at 50 volt caps re-stuffed uh as you can see they actually look pretty convincing i did mark the positive end on all of them with some black ink so that i could double check when i got through and not be nervous there's a good example that one was reversed let's see so they are all finished and now it's time to install i have reinstalled all seven of those astron minimite electrolytic caps that were re-stuffed with modern uh brand new electrolytics and as you can see um the circuit looks like it's untouched back from 1955 which was the original goal okay it's a lot more work but i really think it's worth it and just classic beautiful vintage amps like this next step will be to plug in the tubes and test the four uh coupling caps they are 2.1 and 2.02 and i'll show you how that's done as you see here from the 12a y7 because it has two triodes there are two coupling caps between each triode and the following 12 ax7 grid okay so we come from the plate of the 12a y7 through the 0.1 at 400 to the grid so i'll have to check these two coupling caps and then from the plates of the 12ax7 we have 0.02 microfarad coupling caps to the grids of the 6v6s so four coupling caps and all four will have to be checked let's take a few moments away from our project to open a nice christmas present here from a mr shea in massachusetts wow check this out an acrylic guitar stand and a birch plywood guitar stand stainless steel hinges and some toys that the kitties i know are going to enjoy uh it was accompanied by a letter let's take a look let's see and close please find some treats for the cats along with a couple of guitar stands for you clear standards acrylic the wood is seven ply baltic birch finished with danish oil and furniture paste wax stainless steel hinges his wife helps him the stands are available uh for sale on both reverb and on ebay and it appears that his business name is centerfold stands so if any of you like the looks of this and who wouldn't uh especially for some of those early plexiglas body guitars uh both in acrylic and in the birch plywood i suggest then that you check out centerful stands on both reverb and ebay so thanks so much mark and merry christmas and happy new year to you next on the holiday hit parade are all the fantastic gifts that the kitties received from generous fans and viewers look at all those treats these toys little vial of catnip that you put inside some of the toys a big box of greenies and a hand painted in oils painting of ollie celebrating her uh move into the house by my good friend jay in california he sure captured the eye color and that's perfect i think it's a great impressionistic painting and all sorts of fantastic treats and toys for my favorite girls and boys and then a gift for yours truly uh from craig hollaball it's a kind of a key caddy for all the hot rod keys you connect the key to a quarter inch uh jack and then you get like a mini fender guitar head that you plug them into and this goes up on the wall really snazzy craig and very useful thank you i also got a cd from a group called bandit they play kind of good old-fashioned rock music and this is their uh album cd retro nova and last and certainly not least is this incredible metal sculpture here from my friend and amp repair customer greg baker you can see it's an institutional light bulb housing here with fittings screwed in right angle fittings and uh bulbs to simulate the rocket engines firing it's at a sporty angle here with a just beautiful hardwood base okay sort of a mosaic pattern all very industrial very steam punkish and inside the rocket is this what i believe is an led light bulb okay and that classic old mazda shape let's uh turn down the lights and turn this beast on and you'll see it in action okay are you ready kind of get glared out there by the rocket but look at those engines pretty snazzy eh i'm thinking about putting in a kind of a tubular piece of sheet metal inside with portholes cut that will kind of suppress the brightness of that led bulb and still make it look even more like a rocket ship i hope greg would approve but anyway thanks so much uh to greg and to everyone else who was so thoughtful at christmas to remember me and the kitties and let's hope you keep enjoying our videos and stay tuned okay we're going to see you all here in the near future thanks again unfortunately the three wire power cord sent with the amp for me to install is the european color coding which really isn't appropriate for a 1955 vibralux so i went to my cord stash and found one that has a more customary black white and green colors and i'm going to cover the green with shrink wrap because uh you know there no green ground wire was ever seen in a tweed amp so this has to be neutralized so that it won't stand out the new three wire power cord has been installed the black wire up here to one side of the on off toggle then a piece of vintage cloth covered wire coming from the other side of the toggle to the tip of the fuse and then from the panel end of the fuse we're going into the primary of the power transformer the other side of the power transformer primary is connected directly to the white return wire the green or ground wire is covered with a shrink wrap and soldered to the chassis also it should be noted that the so-called death cap has been detached from the primary ac circuit and i just left laying here at the bottom of the chassis not really connected to anything but ground i also use the original strain relief piece here so uh everything external looks like it should i'm installing the tube set that came with the amp and uh it's every bit as wonderful as the amp itself they're all vintage tubes rca 6v6s 12ax7 uh they look to be in some cases nos totally impressive but instead of a 12a y7 in our first preamp position i was sent a 12ax7 now there's a big difference the 12ax7 has an amplification factor of a hundred so i went and dug into my tube stash and found a genuine uh vintage 12ay7 and it has an amplification factor of only 40. okay so it's 40 percent the output of the 12ax7 and it's a big part of the character of the sound for one of these tweed uh vibraluxes so i'm going to plug my tube in and we're going to use it for our testing purposes and for our audio evaluation now with the proper 12 ay7 preamp tube installed the eurotubes bias probes in series with the 6v6 output tubes to give us a reading of the plate current and plate voltage to be sure that uh it's not way too high and we don't damage the tubes while we're testing the amp okay we'll do a preliminary check uh we've plugged in the amp with the newly installed three wire power cord and it's time to switch it on and see what happens all right the tubes have stabilized we see that the plate current is too high in the right hand 6v6 this is about right remember these uh tubes are cathode bias so they can go up to around 11 or 12 watts maximum this is way over so this plate current will have to be brought down these tubes don't do not match real well we'll have to check into that too i switch the tubes in the sockets just to make sure that we don't have something wrong with one of the sockets remember the left one was 36 the right one was 43 and now they've completely changed position just like the tubes so it is the tubes it isn't the socket next we're going to have to alter the bias resistor to bring this down to a tolerable level that tube mismatch was a little too wide for my liking it was a little over seven milliamps which can cause a little hum if you're not careful so i went to the tube stash and found a similar vintage 6v6 and i put it in and you see we're within what about three milliamps so i'm going to use my tube with one of the original tubes and we're going to use this for our continued testing our bias adjustment and for our audio demo now i'm going to double check the bias with the replacement tube remember there's one two that came with the amp and one from my stash and we're getting pretty good agreement here let's write down these values and calculate our plate dissipation for our 6v6s all right i come up with 13.5 watts on the left 6v6 13.1 watts on the right now this is above the maximum plate dissipation for vintage 6v6s uh it's it probably should be closer to around say 11 watts 10 to 11 watts so we're going to have to cool these tubes down a little bit by increasing the value of the bias resistor after experimentation with several different bias resistor values i found that 500 ohms worked quite well uh you see here we got 28.5 milliamps at 377 plate volts which gives us around 10.86 watts of plate dissipation which i think is ideal the tube should last and the tone should be great so i'm going to hard wire in this larger bias resistor and then we'll recheck and make sure that everything's still okay now that the output tubes are properly biased it's time to focus on the final components that we will need to uh evaluate and that is the coupling caps okay they're essential to the proper operation of the amplifier and they are subjected generally to some fairly high voltage now there are several ways to do this that require special equipment in which the cap is removed from the circuit charged up to full operating voltage and then leakage is measured i have a more dynamic way that you can perform your check with the capacitor in circuit and under normal operating conditions and that is i simply plug in the amp turn it on and then measure the plate current in the tube on the far side of the coupling caps here's 2.1 at 400 volts and both of them are going to affect the plate current in the phase inverter 12ax7 now how am i going to do that well i'm going to measure the voltage drop across the bias resistor which is our normal way of measuring the uh plate current in a tube that is cathode biased so we're going to hook up the amp get it running put our clips on either side of the 1500 ohm bias resistor and see if the voltage drop across it remains constant if it does it means that these capacitors are functioning properly if it starts to drift upward it means that the positive dc from the plate is coming through leaking through getting to the grid of the tube and causing a greatly enhanced plate current through the grid okay so let's hook up our leads turn on the amp and monitor the stability of the plate current within the phase inverter 12ax7 now the digital multimeter probes are connected to either side of the bios resistor which is underneath the bypass cap okay and we see it it shows on the schematic as being 1500 ohms and it is right on the money about 1451 ohms now i'm going to change from resistance over here to dc voltage we'll turn on the app and we'll monitor the voltage drop across that resistor over a period of like four or five minutes all right the amp has been on now for oh two or three minutes it's stabilized and we see that the voltage drop across the 1500 ohm uh cathode bias resistor which tells us the stability of the plate current within the tube is right at 2.5 volts now i'm going to turn off the camera wait about two or three more minutes and let's see if it stays at this value or if it goes up we know that if the uh coupling caps leak this will steadily increase if it stays constant these coupling caps are fully functional okay two more minutes have passed and as you see it's absolutely stable okay i think we can trust these 0.1s now let's move on to the 0.02 microfarad coupling caps for our output tubes and we can use our eurotubes bias probes for this purpose because they give us a reliable measurement of plate current within the tube okay this uh has been on now for three or four minutes and it looks very stable to me 30.3 25.2 i see no upward trend in plate current and i haven't seen any over the past few minutes so i'm going to say that the 0.02 microfarad at 400 volt coupling caps for the output tubes are functioning properly now if you don't have euro 2 bias probes you can revert back to the manual method that i just demonstrated for the 12x7 and measure the stability the voltage drop across the cathode bias resistor for the two output tubes and as an added bonus we can look back here at the voltage drop on our 12ax7 this is four or five minutes later and it's still right at 2.5 okay so our coupling caps pass muster and i think it's time now for our audio demonstration one added benefit of this method is that once you know the voltage drop across the cathode bias resistor and you know its resistance you can divide and determine the a plate current within the 12ax7 now bear in mind this is for both triodes because they both share a common cathode bias resistor so uh you see that between the two the total is uh 1.7 milliamps now that's well within the acceptable parameters for 12ax7s that would be about eight .85 a milliamps per uh triode well the chassis has been reinstalled in the cabinet the speaker's plugged in i'm going to uh install the rear door just because it might have some effect on the tone of the amp then i'll turn it around and we can begin our audio demonstration well it looks like we're all set up and ready for the audio demonstration of our 1955 fender tremolox amp we have the traditional shure m57 aimed just off center of the alnico speaker cone and we're gonna play uh four tunes through the instrument input four tunes through the microphone input and a couple tunes with the tremolo at different speeds and depths okay so here we go [Music] hmm [Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] okay [Music] [Music] do [Music] [Music] well i guess that's about it for this video featuring the 1955 model 5e9 fender tremolox amp i want to take a few moments to express my traditional appreciation to all my patreon patrons and paypal contributors who have kept us on the air and so far advertising free for another month should you choose uh to join them in support of our channel i will put links in the video description which will enable you to do so i also wanted to thank all the very generous viewers who sent such wonderful christmas gifts to both me and my furry little elves uh we really appreciate it thanks so much uh you all are the greatest and now for a part two video uh this will be a little change of pace but it's in response to a bunch of requests i got to discuss how to build a chassis stand for amplifier repair and what i'm going to do is i will go through how the stand that i have the homemade stand was made and also how a commercial stand looks and works okay so if that sounds interesting please stay tuned well greetings and welcome to our part two video in which we will discuss how to construct our own uh amplifier chassis stand as you have seen in several of my videos once this stand showed up and it was given to me by a very generous viewer a whole bunch of other viewers started asking how can they make their own version of this okay so i'm gonna go through uh how it was constructed and i'm also going to show a pattern here that shows each of the pieces of wood with all of the dimensions now i'm going to draw this up a little bit neater and i will post it with a link in the video description so for those who have a table saw and rather rudimentary woodworking skills all you have to do is cut out the pieces that i show in my diagram and we'll discuss right now very quickly how to assemble them into your fina finished stand first off this floor here is 28 by 8 inches wide and it is the full length and width of the unit okay then there are two rails one on either side which are one and a half inches by 27 and a quarter the reason they're not 28 is we're going to have this vertical piece here that's three quarters of an inch thick so that your rails will come flush at this end and flush here with the tail piece on the base unit here i guess we could call this the cradle okay so we have the four piece the 28 by eight inch floor and we've got the two side rails glued in place and then we glue the vertical wall you notice that it doesn't come all the way to the bottom but it butts right up against the edge of the floor also while i have it in this position we have our four screwed on rubber feet and we also have a uh one of those tack in type of nuts a t-nut here in the floor and i'll give you the dimensions of where it's located i modified this stand a bit by adding a second one right here we'll talk about that in a few minutes also if you notice uh the joints are both glued and screwed it's quite poetic and um you want it to be good and solid okay so that's how the cradle is assembled and then just for a nice touch there is a one and a half by eight inch piece an extension that comes off of this vertical piece you could probably live without it but it gives you a nice a wider surface for your chassis to lay against and i put some uh kind of corrugated rubber material i bought at lowe's put it on here so that it's it won't abrade the chassis and it has more friction kind of hold it in place okay so that's how the cradle is made we'll talk about these holes in just a few minutes next we have the sliding piece here and it's a little more complex it's six and a half inches wide and 15 inches long and if as you see it goes the full length of the sliding unit all of the wood here is three quarter inch birch plywood okay i really recommend that you use something like that so you have a nice smooth surface it looks decent and it has strength and it's not going to warp this was just cut out of plywood however i notice okay so now we have the floor of the sliding unit and then then we have the end piece of the slider unit which you see perches right atop the floor and um it is eight inches wide just like this end but because it's perched up on three quarters of an inch of plywood it's only seven and a quarter inches tall from here to here okay so uh that means that from the floor right here all the way up to the top it's exactly eight inches tall just like the other side otherwise you're going to have your chassis at an angle these two surfaces here have to be at exactly the same height once again another little perch was added on here to give a little bit wider uh area for the amp chassis to lay upon we should also notice the three and a half by one and a half inch braces that reinforce and strengthen that vertical wall on the slider unit so that it can't come loose and move outward and allow the chassis to fall crushing your precious ampere x12 x7s one last bit of detail is the three-quarter by three-quarter cut out here at the bottom of that back wall to allow clearance of the side rails the side rails then will fit right in here and then as you see the slider fits in between the side rails and can move left and right and the final consideration here is this slot that has been milled although you can use a saw blade saber saw anything of that sort to make a slot a little bit wider than 5 16 with one inch inlet here okay from the end and one and three quarters inch from this end remember that the piece goes all the way to the end this is hiding three quarters of an inch of your floor so you want one and three quarters of an inch to the end for the uh where your slot terminates okay now if you look down through there you can see the hole that's been drilled in the floor and that hole is located in the exact center of the floor piece since the floor piece is 28 inches long it's 14 inches from the left 14 from the right four inches in and four inches up okay dead center okay and it is located directly under the slot now what we will then use is a 5 16 inch threaded either piece of threaded stock or a bolt or something like that with a wing nut on the on the end or a knob like this this looks like an adjuster you could probably buy at home depot you place it right through your floor and then you're going to screw this down and when you set your supports to exactly the right width for your chassis you'll just tighten this down and lock them in place so that they can't move and your chassis can lay atop this quite easily now the uh bolt that you need is going to be as i said 5 16 and about one and a half inches long because you're going to be going through three quarters of an inch of plywood and three quarters of an inch of plywood and you'll need a little leeway for a washer and then because we're up on rubber feet it can protrude a little bit through the t-nut so i'm thinking around one and a half inches maybe one and a quarter inches for the length of the threaded stock that you use to lock this down now why did i drill this extra hole well when you close this to its smallest width there's still 14 and a half inches here between the supports and several of the chassis that i've worked on were less than that in width so the chassis stand wouldn't work they would just fall through so let me show you what i came up with to solve that problem well a solution came to mind and that is you remove the locking bolt take the slider out and reverse it and then put the locking bolt in to the hole that i drilled second now the hole that i drilled to allow the slider to be reversed so that you can uh use this unit to support smaller chassis is located midway between the left edge of the cradle and the center so that's going to be seven inches from the left seven inches from the center hole now your cradle is adjustable from very very narrow to a reasonable width but you can accommodate 12 13 14 inch chassis this way the only chains necessary was to drill a second hole and put in a t-nut everything else is the same even the locking device okay so that's how this is built and like i said i'm going to draw up a simple diagram of the pieces of wood that you need to cut and then if you watch the video that i've just made you'll see how those pieces go together all the details of how they uh are assembled and i think you can build your own now what about those of you who do not have table saws drills routers or whatever it takes to build this and you still want to have a chassis stand well if you're willing to spend some money let me show you a second by coincidence i was contacted by the people at mojo tone and asked if i would do a demonstration uh or an evaluation of their chassis stand and i thought wow what a coincidence okay i've been intending to cover the homemade one so let's see what your alternative is if you don't want to spend the time and effort and don't have the tools to build that let's see what's available to you and uh if it's really worth maybe a little greater expenditure now just for the record uh this is what it's called and what its part number is so if you decide you want to contact mojo tone and get one of these jewels this is what you'll be ordering well let's say this it's beautifully packed okay so let's uh get it out of the box and on the workshop table so we can see what we got all right i'm impressed take a look at what we got here really nice baseboard with uh little pockets here for components nuts and bolts and things like that they're inlet into the baseboard and lined with black felt got the mojo tone label up here really snazzy uh kind of a enameled chrome metal and you see the sliding pieces both are able to slide left and right unlike the one i have in which only one of the sides will slide also we have our locking bolts here our t-nuts and our washers they sent a little sticker and some guitar picks as well which is always welcome so now i'm going to finish the assembly by installing the lock nuts on either side of the sliders with the t-nuts underneath okay and i'll be right back once i've done that and we'll see how how smoothly it moves and also i see two features about this that i like better than my homemade one while i was assembling the unit i found a nice touch that those sliding lock bolts are actually allen head up bolts and so i guess if you tighten it too much where you can't loosen it with your fingers or you want it really tight you could use an allen wrench okay in that socket in the head of the knob all right i completed the assembly it took all about 30 seconds okay you see that the locking of bolts uh now are connected to the t-nuts and i there is a problem i think and here's something i think you could do if you get one of these to make it a lot better and that is when it's sitting on the table now it's sitting on the t-nuts and that makes it really hard for you to slide the sliding pieces even though they're loose okay your the weight of the unit is pushing the t-nut into the wood at the bottom so i'm going to install some rubber feet on this right now and see if it doesn't make things work a little better all right i've installed my world famous home depot rubber feed on all four corners and now the unit sits up off the countertop it won't slide around but the left and right sliders will move easily and a final touch that i think is a real good one for nicely made wood objects like this is to coat the surface and seal it with johnson's paste wax i'm going to do that i'll be right back all right the unit is assembled and you notice we have like a little l here at the bottom of the uh piece that's going to hold the chassis have a matching one on the other side and the beauty of this is that you with this unit can tilt the chassis toward you so that you're working not up here on top trying to work down on it you know how tiresome that gets for your neck and your back you can actually sit down and with the chassis tilted toward you work straight ahead okay so your neck is not cramped for hours on end i thought that was very clever also another benefit that this has is that this piece restricts the travel of the chassis that way this piece restricts it that way so when you kind of wedge it in between these two uprights it cannot possibly move left or right and fall off of one of the uprights which it really can do with the homemade stand so you can operate it with the pivots at a low position like this which would be best for me i have a fairly high workbench so i don't really want this thing way up in my face or if i had a shorter workbench i'd move the pivot up to here and move the locker into that routered arc and it would be up here moving back and forth so you've got height adjustment tilt and sure locking in of your chassis so it doesn't fall off one end and crush your uh amperex 12ax7s so i guess that's about it i see some definite benefits to this and it is beautifully made so this is your second option okay i'm going to use this one for the next few videos just to kind of get a hang of it and i really appreciate the fine people at mojo tone for sending this to me and i'm only too glad to evaluate a good quality merchandise like this and i think i'm doing you viewers of service because i'm making you aware of the availability of something that you might not have known about okay so that's it for our discussion on two different types of chassis stands i hope you enjoyed it and i hope to see you in the near future in our next video

Channel: Uncle Doug

Views: 35,815

Rating: 4.990654 out of 5

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Id: TsI2x2FRTSw

Length: 64min 33sec (3873 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 17 2021