found at a yard sale

[sundin4prez]

so after the talk of turning old radio's and record players in to amps , i was on the look out...


i bought this for $10 form my neighbor across the street , can this be an amp??

thanks.... :headbang: :headbang: :headbang: :headbang:

 

[willyk]

..well, there's an amp in there somewhere  :headbang:

 

[DocNrock]

Is there a 12ax7 in there somewhere?

 

[-CB-]

That is a classic "AA5" radio, a suicide special.

It cannot really be converted to guitar use... well... you dont wanna.

What you DO want to do, is recap the radio (www.tubesandmore.com) clean it up, and play AM on it.  Its worth more as a vintage AM radio than as a bastard guitar amp.

Old phonographs work better as guitar amps, as the input infrastructure coming off a phono cartridge is better to work with.

The AA5, "All American 5 " radio is designed for one thing - CHEAP production.  It uses wall 117vac on the heaters in series, and had a nasty habit of shocking the living hell out of folks, to where it was eventually deemed an unsafe design... and phased out before the lawyers got hold of the whole mess.  They made a TON of those radios after WWII.

 

[sundin4prez]

ok thanks for the info......at my grandpa's house there is a record player there the size of a teachers desk(the best i can describe it) and i took a peek in the back and it looks like there are "tubes" that look simaler to the one in an amp.... i eventuallly get down there to take pics do find out if i can make a amp out of it...

 

[-CB-]

To convert a phono to an amp - just wire where the phono cartridge is, to an input jack.  Thats all ya need to get something going from it.
Once you know it works, then you can customize.  I've got one here... I pulled the motor and mechanical.  Will make a cover from some grille cloth and mount it behind.  Then you open/close the box for more tone....  Just know that a HB pickup puts out more signal than a phono cartridge, and you're gonna get unreal blues tone.  I mean unreal....

 

[sundin4prez]

since i know nothing about amps or record players , where would the  phono cartridge  be located and what does it look like

 

[RLW]

Wow. That made me feel really old.

 

[DocNrock]

Wow. That made me feel really old.

+100 years.

 

[-CB-]

since i know nothing about amps or record players , where would the  phono cartridge  be located and what does it look like

Ok lets start from square flippin one.

There's a thing called a "record", a vinyl disk with grooves in it... real fine grooves you can sort of see and feel.  Usually they're black.  They come in a few sizes.  Big ones with small holes, small ones with bigger holes.

They way they work is... they sit on a sort of circular disk thing, called a turntable, and spin around and around at a certain steady speed.  Then an arm - the tone arm - with a sort of sylus ( expensive word for "needle" ) rests in the groove on the record.  As the record spins, the groves make the stylus bump around.  This bumping around is in direct proportion to both the frequency and amplitude (loudness) of the recorded sounds captured on the record. 

The stylus is set into a "cartridge" at the end of the tone arm.  As the stylus wiggles and shakes like an Egyptian belly dancer, the cartridge senses the movement and converts it by way of a magnet and coils of wire (sound familiar) into electrical signals that can be amplified.

The cartridge is easy to spot, its the thing with wires coming from it at the end of the tone arm. 

YMMV, best of luck, skip the gutter and post haste.

Pip Pip!

 

[Mor Paul]

I feel like a nerd now
I've taken all of my parents records, have three turntables, my grandparents and my parents cassette players and receivers, other big boxes that do various things, and still collect records.
And I'm 15...

Vinyl Rules :headbang1:

 

[guitlouie]

Vinyl Rules

+ 1000

 

[Volitions Advocate]

The only vinyl i ever had as a kid was a book on "tape" of return of the jedi....

i grew up with the cassette generation.

back then it was all brook 'n dunn and dwight yokam for me.
thank goodness for smashing pumpkins and nine inch nails for rescuing me from my parents brainwashing....

 

[Wana_make_a_guitar]

If you can change a radio into an amp, wouldn't it be possible, while taking a whole heap of crap outa the thing, to turn a really old television into an amp. I got one thats about as big as a 100 watt cab i guess. if i that couldn't be turned into an amp i'll just take all the electronic parts from it and use some of my dads old amps in it.

 

[-CB-]

Some really old TV's contain amps that are ready to go.  Usually they're single ended 6V6 or EL84 amps with decently good speakers.

The problem is.... these are few and far between.  The TV's with stand alone amps had huge cabinets, and of those, only some have stand alone amps, mostly to get them away from the "TV" section of the set where hum is created.  I know GE and RCA both made sets like that.

Here though is the "gotcha".  TV's like most manufactured stuff, are/were made to be inexpensive to produce.  This means they would run the amp voltage from some already existing high voltage supply.  I know of no instance where the "amp" section has its own transformer for power.  TV's will get your hair curled and teeth spinning far easier, and far worse than any tube amp ever thought of. 

In short - its just not worth it.  I know one "famous for his butchery" well known amp man that has boasted of stealing transformers from TV's for use in audio amps.  Just dont go there.

Just do it the easy way.  Get a record player, movie projector, audio enabled film strip projector, reel-2-reel deck... all that old stuff has really decent low wattage amplification that guitar pickups will drive into the creamiest blues tones you ever wanted to hear.  And, they wont get you killed unless you really ask for it.