Cool RCA "guitar"-amp

[Hayman]

Hi,

A few months ago I bougt a RCA 400 16mm film projector at a school flea market. Costed me 20 dollars. It looked cool, had a mic input and I had a feeling I could use it for something. Well, today I powered it up, plugged a tele into it and to my surprise it sounded really cool.

This is how it looks:

As I said it has a mic input. It also has a volume knob and a tone control. You can turn off the projector section so you won't get any noise from that . A few minutes after I powered it up I heard a scary sound from the inside, like something was frying. Don't know what it was but after turning it off and on again it was fine. :grin:
I was now thinking that there had to be some good stuff inside this thing, and this is what I found:

TUBES!!! :shock:

There are three RCA6V6GT's, one RCA5Y3GT, one RCA6L7GT and one smaller preamp tube that was covered by a shield. There are trafo's too. One RCA6J7 (I think It said s-09 on the actual trafo. Might be a UTC?), one big black and one more that I don't remember.

Here is a few more pics:

The "amp" has a great tone. It distorts in a really nice way and it plays loud enough for me (with the volume at 7 I had a few great hours today).

I don't know if this is of any interest to you guys, but it was so much fun. :grin:


Anyone know something about this circuit?


Thanks

Richard

 

[Scodiddly]

I love those old built-in amps. I've got a couple of tube-based classroom style record players, maybe 10 watts and a detachable 12" speaker. One's a Bogen, one's a Califone, and they both sound great as guitar amps. I haven't even done any real mods yet!

One annoying thing that I intend to fix is that the bass knob only affects the turntable, which makes perfect sense for the original application but not for guitar duty.

These things turn up super cheap, too. My cousin got those two for something like $5 each and just gave them to me in return for some jukebox repairs.

And the other neat thing is that you can experiment with the turntable and maybe get some Leslie speaker effects.

 

[CJ]

You guys! LMAO!
Cool. I mean RCA black plates and probably a Jensen Alnico. It has to sound good.

Welcome to the club Richard!
:guinness:

 

[asm]

thats sweet guys. nice detective work, are most of the older ones tube driven?