My First Guitar Tube Amp

My First Guitar Tube Amp - Fender 5f1

Since I was a child, I love vacuum tube/valve stuff, like old radios and guitar amplifiers, so I decided to build my own guitar amp. I have made a Fender 5f1 model, all from scratch. I made it as a "head" because I want to try different speakers along the time, and the speaker I have at the build time is not a very good one but it does the job.

Before I started the build, I read a lot of things about vacuum tubes so I can be more comfortable with the build. As you also may know, tube circuits use generally high voltages (around 650v in this case) so it may be dangerous if you don't know well what you are doing.

There is a lot of information on the internet about this specific tube amp model. If you plan to build something like this, I recommend you visit this page and watch a lot of videos on YouTube about tube amp build and repair (I recommend 2 channels: Uncle Doug and D-lab Electronics).

Below are the layout and schematic I used for the build. They are the original Fender's. The only thing I changed was the power cord, I used a 3 wire (with ground) power cord for security and removed the "Death-cap" (the capacitor near the fuse), because the main purpose of this cap is to remove some RF interference (that causes "hum") and with a grounded power cord you don't need more this.

For the chassis I used an aluminium bread pan.

Layout

The Schematic

Inside the chassis

This is the final build of the "head"

If you want to header a small pentatonic scale on it, please check my video on YouTube

Some time later...

Now I good a good Jensen 10 inch speaker and decided to build a "combo" like cabinet, much better than the previous design:

Take a look at a small sound demo:

Hope you like it and if you need some kind of help building an amp like that, let me know!

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