Now for the oddball vintage, practice, and other amps...
Sorry for some of the generic pics - I'll have pictures of my actual stuff up soon...

Crate PowerBlock
I picked up one of these while I was gathering the new backline for the jalms. A year earlier, we wound up using one of these little guys for the BASS rig at the Utah Blues Band reunion, and it sounded great! We used it as a 2 x 75 watt head - hitting two 4 ohm 212 cabs - but it can be played at 150 watts into an 8 ohm load. I don't own a bass head, and I thought this would be a handy little guy to have around, just in case.

While trying it out as a slave amp off of my Princeton Chorus, it started cutting in and out... uh-oh! So, I took it to the shop (San Diego Sound and Music Repair again) and bought another (new) one...

Lucky me, they fixed it for free, and had it back in time so that I had both of these on standby at the last jalm. But... they never got used. Crate has discontinued these, don't know why, they ARE cool little amps, voiced quite nicely for guitar - and yes, I could gig with one of these.

Sears Silvertone 1482
Danelectro? Yeah, that's SpongeBob! Yes, that's the nickname that was given to this amp by Scott Douglas, who did some custom rewiring on the chassis before he sold it to me (including reworking the tone stack, and a master volume). The name came from the fact that the particle-board cabinet - and I use the word "cabinet" loosely here - that these originally came with had sat in some water (or some other fluid) for a length of time before he obtained the amp, and the bottom half of the cabinet had literally dissolved away! With the speaker MIA, it was basically a working chassis in half of a particle board box. Shown on the right is the way the amp would have originally appeared - but, not by the time it came to me. I built a new cabinet out of plywood, using the same basic idea and shape of the original cabinet, but not exactly copying it. Scott supplied the blond tolex, and I did a real amateur job of covering the amp (shown left) - oh, well... Looks OK from a little ways away, and doesn't adversely affect anything else - completely solid and sturdy.

This is one of the classic all-tube amps built by Danelectro for Sears in the sixties, and is rated in the Sears catalog at 15 watts. That's a no-name 12" speaker behind the grill in the picture, I honestly don't have a clue to its manufacture. As I recall, it was a pull from an old Traynor 412 cab that was built like a 412 guitar half-stack cab but appeared to be labeled as a PA speaker cabinet (!?).

Here's a nice "unofficial" Silvertone page that has tons of info about Silvertone/Harmony guitars and amps, and scans from old Sears catalogs - talk about yer trip down memory lane...!

April 2010: I just had to do an update. I recently acquired a '82 MusicMan 112RD Fifty - but that's another story. Chatting with my e-pal Dave Patterson about that amp, this amp came up, and I expressed my opinion that I considered this amp a less-than stellar example of a small tube amp. He was shocked and appalled, and suggested some tube changes to make the amp more to my liking. Let me tell you, neighbors, now this amp SINGS! I swapped out the 5751 Scott had in V1 for a JJ ECC83, and it made a huge difference - before, I could never really get the front end of this amp to DRIVE like I wanted, but now it overdrives like crazy. Encouraged by this, I swapped the junk speaker for a Celestion Silver Series V12-60, and this little guy is really starting to scream. Thanks, Dave!

I may try a few 12AX7 tube swaps on the Electar Tube Ten (below) and see if I can't get that one more to my liking, too.

Electar Tube 10
I bought this guy when little tube amps were all the craze about ten years ago (Hello! Little tube amps are STILL all the craze!). This amp has a grand total of TWO TUBES, a 12AX7 and a 6L6. It's rated at ten watts, and has an 8" speaker, with gain, volume, bass, middle, and treble controls.

A lot of buzz was created around this amp, with webpages full of upgrades and mods... I changed out the tubes for the suggested upgrades (I couldn't really hear much difference) and swapped the speaker for the most commonly suggested replacement (a Weber - I think I can ALMOST hear the difference). Blah blah blah. My issue with this amp was that it doesn't seem to have enough front-end gain to push it into the overdrive and crunch I'm looking for with a TUBE amp. The only way I can get my desired level of overdrive going is to hit it with a stompbox, even with the gain cranked all the way up. Heck, I shoulda just bought an overdrive pedal - at least I coulda used that at the jalms...

And, that's what kept me from buying one of the Epiphone Valve Junior tube heads while they were all the rage...

2010: As indicated above, I now officially have the tube amp bug. A couple more tube swaps, and I'm starting to see the potential in this little guy. I've actually opened it up and done a few of the circuit board mods that were suggested - better and better! Now I am leaning towards building a bigger cab and putting this guy with a 12" speaker, as the 8" just doesn't get it for me. It's a journey...