badbluesplayer

Ouch! 😬

Mineral oil. That's what they make all the fretboard oils from. $1.98 for 10 lifetimes' supply - https://www.walmart.com/ip/Equate-Mineral-Oil-Lubricant-Laxative-16oz-Count-1/44807472

Good move. I'd never pay that much for that guitar with that kind of damage.

I shut my engineering practice five years ago after some medical probs but I can't seem to get out of the amp repair business. There's too many people calling me all hours of the day and night. You'd think musicians would be all hunkered down now, but they're out there breaking their cheapo amps and asking me to fix them yesterday. And they all have some kind of money issues. I'll be 65 next year. I swore that I would learn my lesson and get into a business where people are happy to hire you. But NOOOOOOOOOO, I had to get in the middle of poor peoples' money and endorphin issues. So I could charge half of what I used to charge and get shocked once a year just to rub it in. One of my "good" amp customers bought a hard wired Deluxe Reverb clone or something like that from some fly-by-night builder for really cheap and nine months later he's asking me about how come the thing is making all kinds or weird sounds and is unstable. I tell the guy "I'll be happy to help you in any way I can" when I really want to tell him "Who TF do you think you are, asking me to fix some other clown's cheap POS that you could have had me build but you had some guy in Timbuktu do it for half the price?"

Good thing about those DSL's is that they most always break the same way. Mark my words. You'll blow the bridge rectifier feeding the DC filaments. Write it down, lol.

Apparently the amp is the same circuit as the Laney Cub 12. I found a schematic. The "tone " control is the same as a Vox "Cut" control, which is a pretty good feature. The rest of the circuit is pretty normal. The bias is fixed-adjustable, which is different than Vox amps, so it won't sound exactly like a Vox. That's the same biasing as a Blues Junior. Anyway, looks like a good circuit design.

And what's up with the duplicate tone controls? There's a tone control and then treble/middle/bass controls. That's two separate tone sections. Seems like that would suck tone. I'd be interested to see the schematic.

I think you probably get what you pay for with that amp. Sounds kind of weak. Using a Strat and then distorting the heck out of it is one of the worst guitar tones going, so it's hard to tell. Awful. The clean stuff is weak with little dynamics. Not to mention that the guy was having some weird resonance coming through the amp that he couldn't isolate. But he thinks it's "brilliant." "Sounds so good it's ridiculous." But it has some kind of weird resonance. Doh!

There's supposedly one other Chinese factory that's making tubes right now. It's small and they make very high quality stuff that's all rebranded. The main Chinese factory is the only manufacturer who continues to make improvements to the manufacturing process. Egnater had 3000 JJ 12ax7's go bad in the field about 6 or 8 years ago. I can't imagine how much that cost them. I always use a Chinese 12AX7 tube in any place where there's an "elevated cathode voltage", which is, in a Marshall, everything after V1 and before the phase inverter. Otghe tubes are inconsistent. Fenders don't eat tubes in that way. Tung Sol 12AX7's are prob the best sounding tube and I use them in V1 of all amps except Marshalls. I use a JJ for them. JJ's are Marshally sounding. Sovtek LPS's are good for phase inverters. NOS tubes are o.k. The only ones that are consistently useable for customers' amps are the JAN 12AT7's. I don't use NOS tubes other than that. There's nobody to stand behind them. Except me. Anybody who uses NOS tubes has to have a tube tester anyway, and tube testers don't always find every problem. And they don't test whether a tube sounds good, just whether it's shorted and if it puts out signal. Most NOS tubes have been sorted through many times and most NOS tubes are the rejects from decades of sorting.

I picked five pounds of figs today -

Poor guy. Looks like a sweetheart with his one blue and one brown eye. Sorry to hear that.

Too many old men with a pair of panties over their heads complaining how everybody else is a sissy.

Yeah, that red guitar has fret sprout really bad. You have to wonder where that thing's been. I'd have sent it back in a heartbeat. Good move...

We've sold them for $8 per pound for a number of years. They go for 10 at the grocery store. I'm trying to get the wife to go to $10.00. You can eat them fresh, just whole or turn them inside out or cut them in half and eat them off the skin. You can put them in anything. Good with cheese. My wife makes lots of stuff. She makes a fig "base" that's used for lots of things. She mashes them up, cooks them for like 1/2 hour, and uses that for all kinds of stuff, like jam, chutney, cakes, danishes, biscotti. Chefs use them with fancy dishes. Some guy with a cooking school buys them, some restaurants buy them. We sell some through a local fru-fru farmer's market store and my wife sells most of them at a local farmer's market, along with her baked goods.

Yes, it definitely works the other way around too. I'll get you a bucket and you can try it out and maybe you'll have fun. 😁