I spend most of my time over on the ham radio forum.  I enjoy building kits and home brewing stuff.  I've been looking for a tube project lately, so I thought, why not a guitar amp?

Everyone is building Fender Champ clones these days, but I wanted to do something different.  I decided to base mine on the Gibson GA-5 Skylark.  Electrically speaking, it is very similar to the Champ.  I like the Skylark cabinet styling, but decided to change it up just a little.  I've elected to go with top controls, so my cabinet is actually more like a miniature GA-8 Gibsonette, than a Skylark.  I never did find the actual dimensions of the Skylark, so I just designed mine from scratch.  Also, it's going to be hardwood, rather than covered with Tolex. I figure if I don't like the results, I can always cover it anyway.

There is a loooooong way to go, but here is the current state of the cabinet.  

Panels all glued up and ready for some woodworking.


Box joints cut and basic cabinet glued up.


Corners rounded over, and recess cut for the top controls.


Speaker baffle complete.


Feet and handle added, speaker baffle painted and speaker temporarily installed.


Of course I'll have to pull it back apart for the finishing process.

Now, it's just about time to get started on the actual amplifier.

Wish that I could do professional-looking work like that.

Is it going to be a tube or solid-state amp?

Not too familiar with the musical amplifier scene these days (but have a lot of ham radio circuit building experience). I've been meaning to self-teach-learn-to-play lap steel guitar. Might even try building my own. But I have a couple of cheap solid-state Fender amps for now.


ETA: It looks like all of the Fender Champs were based on tubes. Cool...

It has been quite a while since I built a tube circuit or two, but I still have the RCA tube manuals, greenlee chassis punches, a few misc. transformers, and more kicking around in my junkbox.

dude, that is awesome.

Cool I'll be watching for further posts

Count me among the jealous of your woodworking skills.  Nice looking cabinet and it does make a difference IMO.  Should be awesome with that circuit in it.  Have you selected a speaker to match or ??

And how many hours work was that cabinet?

It's funny, I don't consider myself a very good woodworker.  Whenever I make something, all I see are flaws.  I have gotten pretty good at faking it and covering up mistakes, though.  

The speaker is a Jensen P8R.  It's one of the few components I actually have in my hands.  So it's about time to start ordering some stuff.    

I really don't have any idea how much time I have invested so far, but it seems like a lot more than it should have taken.  I suspect this will be a slow project because I get wrapped up in other things along the way.  For instance, I plan to spend much of this weekend playing in the SKCC sprint.

I'll try to update this thread from time to time, as I make progress.

Cool!

I'm glad to see that you used tongue and groove corners on the cab. They're alot more durable than drywall screws.

Fine looking work there. I'll go ahead and cast a vote for Oxblood grill cloth.

Already have it.  I picked it up when I got the speaker.

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I think the oxblood/tan would look awesome on it as well.

Finger joints. Very strong, glue only, no screws.

Sure you don't want to cover that in some snakeskin print tolex?

Also vote for a cathode-biased push-pull 6V6 pair output section like a Princeton. Those rock.

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Here's your amp's twin...lol.  This was my first.  It's covered with plain wicker mat, based on a Fender '57 inside.  Here my first arch top is trying it out.

Wow, very nice.  It really  does look like a twin of my amp.

I haven't made much progress on mine.  I did find an enclosure that was about right in two dimensions, but way too long in the third.  I managed to cut it down to size, and then started cutting the openings for the transformer, etc.  And that's about when I got sidetracked with other projects/hobbies.  

I really need to get going on it, again.

Good stuff guy's. I got to play IJB's guitars and that amp. Really god sounding gear.