I have been looking for this amp
for a while and one day it appeared on Ebay.
Unfortunately it was in Australia
which meant heavy shipping costs. Then I found out
that there were some heavy bids after this amp. But
let me tell you, the name of this amp lives up to
itself. I paid top dollar for it and it was
a Joke when I received it . OK, I knew it wasn¹t working when I bought it but how bad
was another story or should I say joke. This was one
basket case. Nothing worked, I mean nothing.
The first thing I had to find was some history on
the amp it self. I went to the Watkins site and to
some others that I knew that had these amps at one
time. I got in touch with Charlie Watkins
- the man who invented this amp. He had a friend of
his that owned one and lived in LA. lucky
he had the printout for the amp, but of course it
was not very clear. All the listings were unclear
and all the resistors values were gone. The cap listings
were sort of there. This was going to become one big
guessing game.
The Journey
I needed to find the original
mains transformer and original output tranny.
Well that was almost impossible. So I had the mains
made to spec. At least I thought I was. I had found a company that said that they
could. I gave them the exact measurements and current
specs. Well I almost got that. When I had received
the transformer after waiting 5 months I didn’t get
what I had ordered. It was very good but not what
I had ordered. At that time I didn’t know that there
were other amps that Watkins used that had
the same output transformer. I now have the original
output tranny.
Just to get going on this I had acquired an output
tranny
for the AC30.
Now the fun!
That’s right nothing worked. I
had no idea what was going on.
Now to find the problems. . .
Two very good email friends of
mine were kind enough to guide me through this. Tim
Fletcher has two of these amps in
non-working condition. He was able to send me lots
of pictures of the amp so I could see what was going
on in there and what the original parts would look
like – well, sort of. That was such a good help to
me.
Alan Vale also guided me
through the electronics of the amp and gave me hints
on what to look for. Another great help was Rich
Johnson from New York Music in L.I. N.Y. Mitch
Colby from Marshall/Korg
USA also helped out as well. At first I thought the
problem was the wrong output tranny.
Mitch let me know one morning that the problem was
not the tranny so that directed me to look elsewhere in the amp. That’s
where Rich came in also.
I decided to check over all the
parts in the pre amp section. I had seen that some
of the caps where changed and replaced with incorrect
values. I decided to replace them with the correct
ones, checked the other hunts caps that were in there
to find they were not good. Well as soon as I changed
them, wow, the power was back. What a great sound.
The tremolo was OK. It did sound
better with newer caps. The Copycat was not recording
though. To make another long story short I noticed
that a dropping resistor was changed. That’s right
it was the wrong resistor in there. It needed a 3.3k
resistor not the 330k that it was replaced with and
like magic the Copycat worked - it was now receiving
the correct voltage. I got the heads aligned properly
and now the tape delay section sounds great.
Was it worth it? For me, yes.
For you, who knows.
I was just told by Charlie Watkins
people are asking for this amp again. Oh, there were
only 400 made.
