One day I was cleaning up and organizing the leftovers from my past projects and I ended up with a bunch of extra capacitors, resistors, tube sockets, tubes, knobs, switches, pieces of tolex, and even scrap wood from that larch tree I mentioned earlier. I remembered that the little Fender Champ amp is widely used as an example of how the tube amp works. I always wanted to build one. So I ordered a few missing parts and asked my daughter again to design the faceplate for it.
While I was building the cabinet for the amp, the knife of the router slipped and made a dent in the top of the cabinet. I tried to clean it up by taking an additional 1-2 cm off of the edge. When I tried to mount the 8” Jupiter speaker in and then the chassis, I found out that the transformer was hitting the back magnet of the speaker and the chassis wouldn’t fit into the pre-drilled holes. Also, I wouldn’t be able to close the back panel if I moved the chassis further outwards. I was pretty bummed because the dovetails on the box looked really nice this time. Anyway, I still had some more wood to make a new box and this time I was more careful while cutting and routing.
The “messed-up box” was sitting in the corner for a while and I was thinking how to use it with the same chassis and the same speaker, but with a different transformer that would fit. Practicing one day on my little 9V powered Blackstar Fly amp made me search for some schematics for a small transistor amp. Yet again Rob Robinette had a great article on the Ruby solid state amp.
While I was working on it, I decided to swap the grillcloth on the Champ for something that would look nicer. I kept the cane grillcloth with the redwine tolex and ordered a new black&white for the black Champ.
