Amazing Carlsbro skip find!

.I discovered this old solid state amp that had been dumped in a skip one morning when opening up the College, it looked in a really sorry state - dirty, had been rained on and all the knobs were missing, part of the speaker chassis was rusty and the reverb wires had gone. Our AV manager said there was no chance it would work but I obtained permission to take it home and try to restore it.I stripped the whole thing down, every rusty metal screw and fitting was taken out, cleaned up with a wire brush attached to an electric drill and repainted. The main amp chassis was clean as a whistle inside and I cleaned up all the contacts and sprayed out all the pots with deoxit and left to dry out while i removed the speaker, speaker mounting board and reverb unit to work on.After cleaning out the cabinet and respraying the speaker grille i cleaned up the 12" speaker chassis (unknown make, 4 ohm) with the wire brush and resprayed it - amazingly the paper cone was in perfect condition with no sign of any rot! I rewired the reverb unit and spent an afternoon putting the whole thing back together, including fitting some spare Marshall knobs i had...WOW - no it didn't blow up! - it works well, all the pot controls worked silently and it sounded really loud. I guess Carlsbro could be a subdivision of Fender as it sounded just like a Fender, wonderfully sharp and bassy clean but boxy, gravelly distortion, the gimmicky "edge", "bright" and "punch" controls didn't do much to improve it, but overall a very useable budget amp, especially for testing new builds in my workshop. Finished off the cab with some black spray paint - looks like new!I did a bit of research on my UK made "Carlsbro Stingray Lead 65" and found it could have been made in the mid-80's, not bad - i saved a 25 yo amp from the scrap heap, my little contribution to recycling! (-;.

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Comments

Webweaver April 29, 2012 at 10:04am

Love it when people find stuff like this. Next door neighbours currently got a skip on their drive. Had a look in, but only brick rubble and water. Don't think even Chickenbone John could do anything with that!
ChickenboneJohn April 29, 2012 at 5:42am

It's crazy what people throw away..well done on rescuing it. I've got a Carlsbro Wasp combo...a mighty 10 watts that must be 35 years old at least, made in an age when we actually used to make stuff in the UK and could make it right.
Clock The Wolf April 29, 2012 at 5:03am

I found an old ham sandwich once... :-(
Uncle John April 28, 2012 at 8:40am

Yes, a cool story. Lots of work with the risk it would be in vain. Good save, Slowpaw.
Slowpaw Steve T April 28, 2012 at 4:42am

Will record this sometime soon - the clean is like chunky chrome, the distortion sounds like a very hungry Bear with a migrane! (0:

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