The Fenton Project

This is an interesting project. Commissioned by a fellow TGP'er, I am building an amp inspired by the Fenton 110. This is a variant on the classic 2xEL84 theme. Everybody and his kid brother has a Marshall 18W alike or Vox AC15-ish amp - this was different enough to be interesting and right in line with my experience with EL84 practice.

I had never heard of this company before - NB, this is not the vintage Fenton Weill - rather a small and now defunct builder. My client had tried this amp for a time and liked it, and now wanted one for himself but has been unable to find one.



A couple of things stand out about this design, and there are a few changes in store. Since we aren't going to be using the low gain input jack, that component will be omitted, which should make for better reliability (I've worked on a lot of JCM 800s with the complaint of "lo gain input works, hi gain doesn't). We're also making a change to the power supply. Our build will use some extremely beefy AC15 type iron from Magnetic Components. This means a 6CA4 rectifier tube instead of the 5Y3. The original used a Fender Deluxe Reverb type output tranny so this should be a good bit more solid.

The client has a very nice 1x12 cab that was previously occupied by a heavily modded Epiphone Valve Jr that the new amp will be designed to go into.



Updates to follow shortly.

I'm Back

After a long time away, I am back and blogging again.

Just to kick things off, here's an interesting failure mode that came into my day job:



It's actually easier to plug that power cord into the XLR than into the power inlet jack where it belongs. Sometimes in a design you have to consider possibilities that seem impossible.