Saturday 29 October 2011

Harley Benton GA5 head

Wow... turns out it's been nearly a month since I last updated this blog. That's mostly due to the fact I haven't really done any project stuff in that time. Which is lame as I still have that Swift LP copy to finish off.

Anyway, today I went to Bristol and picked up a non-working Harley Benton GA5 head for £10. The GA5 is basically an Epiphone Valve Junior with a tone control added and with the "Valve Junior" scraped off the PCB. I've had a look inside and can see no obvious problems (exploded components, loose wires, etc.) so tomorrow will power it up and see if it makes a noise. When I originally took the back off I noticed some kind of broken plastic thingy containing a fuse coming out of one of the transformers and thought that might be the problem but looking inside the wire doesn't connect to anything so I assme it's a bit of generic construction and whether it gets connected to anything depends on other factors (I suspect it'll be something to do with the country it's going to be used in).

Anyway, here are some pictures. It's not a bad looking little amp really. I've called it Bert.

Harley Benton GA5 Head

Inside the amp

Guts - main PCB

Guts - volume and tone stack

Quite pleased with this really... needs a whole bunch of work doing; even if it did work some of the components probably aren't as good as they could be and I'm not sure I'm keen on all those floating resistors.

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