Done, '59 Magnatone 260A cabinet rebuild

[nuke]

This was a lot of work. I pretty much taught myself how to use a job-site table saw to build cabinets out of plywood.

A lot of improvising and thinking through stuff, a small pile of wasted miss-cut wood, and playing archeologist through the pile of water-damaged, stinky, dirty remains of the old Magnatone cabinet that sat on the damp floor of a barn for a long time.

I think some of the hardest stuff was getting the cleats right for the angled, slide-in chassis. Lot of careful measuring and alining to get things right, so the metal chassis could go in. It also has three screws that hold it to a rail on the baffle board. I opted to set the supports a little lower than perfect, so I could use shims at assembly time. Turned out to be a good strategy, partly because the old water damaged parts were a little distorted and the chassis slightly bent from handling.

Best tool ever is an air-powered stapler. The original cabinet was dado-glued and stapled with narrow-crown staples. I did the same and it worked very well.

The only thing I managed to save from the cabinet was the baffle board, with grille cloth and the aluminum "Magnatone" extrusion, and the cool little "V" on the grill. Due to the fully-floating design, the baffle board didn't get damaged by water. Humidity took a toll on the speakers, but I had them reconed years ago, and the whole project sat on a shelf in my garage for 20 years waiting.

My biggest error was in choosing the covering material. I used a leatherette, that looks really close to the original. But, I made life very hard on myself. Very hard to work with and utterly intolerant of mishandling, and it isn't durable enough for this purpose. Someday, I'll have to recover it with better, tougher Tolex. But not today and not till I figure out how to outside, 4-sided corners. (nightmare).

I still have to finish the footswitch and then go through the amp electronics and recap it and whatever else it might need. I have actually heard the amp work, some 20 years ago, briefly, to decide whether to take it to the bin, or fix it. Probably a couple more weeks and I'll haul it out to a blues jam.

But here it is:

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and here it was....

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[Stevem]

Nice resurrection there!

[martin manning]

Looks great! Were the circuit components in decent shape? How much restoration was required there?

[nuke]

Looks great! Were the circuit components in decent shape? How much restoration was required there?

I think the electronics are probably OK. Weirdly enough, the amp worked 20 years ago, just jumper clipped a couple of filter caps onto the cans and the amp section just worked, including the pitch-shifting vibrato. I have many of the original Amperex "bugle boy" 12AX7, RCA 6CG7, even the tube shields set aside for it.

I have a set of radial caps coming, there's plenty of room to install terminal strips to mount the caps. Not sure what else it might need yet. It is cathode biased 6L6GB/5881 from the factory. There's a (factory) taped off lead from the power transformer that is most likely a bias supply. Might investigate that.

There's a lot of very fine, silty dirt to clean out. It's like superfine powdered clay and nothing but scrubbing will get it out. Chassis has some minor rust on it from being subjected to humidity, but nothing bad. Components mostly look OK. Blue-molded axial film signal caps, like Fender eventually switched to. All the e-lytics are in two cans, a four section with a 20uf@50v for the cathode bias, and 3x 20uf@500 on the main chassis. There's a 3-section on the preamp subchassis, 20/10/10 @450v, but they tied the two 10uf together for 20uf.

I'll yank it out and clean all the dirt off it in the garage before it goes to my work bench inside the house for final and thorough going over.