As my first ever amp build, I decided to go with the Fender Deluxe Reverb. The Deluxe Reverb is one of the most famous amps of all time. It offers a wide spectrum of sounds from heavenly cleans to beautiful tube breakup. It also has a two tube reverb circuit and a roach powered tremolo.
As this was my first amp build ever, I decided to go with a kit build instead of having to source all of the parts myself. I chose to go with this kit from Mojotone, an amp supply store out of North Carolina. On the Mojotone website, they rate this amp a 4/5, meaning that the builder should know how tube amps work and all of the types of problems that can arise from tube amps. Me, having built some pedals, thought that I could completely handle this. While I was mostly right, there were a couple things I wish I had known, especially about build etiquette (neatness of build) As a result of this amp being my first, there were a few things I could have done neater, which could have saved me time when it got to the troubleshooting stage of the build. For information on that, check out my blog post on difficulties with the build.
This amp follows the famous and highly coveted Fender AB763 circuit. While building this amp, I had one major difficulty, and that was with the tremolo system. To try and troubleshoot this issue, I asked Mojotone for the bottom of the board point by point voltage chart and, carefully, went through the bottom of the board voltages. I found that one of them was off. This led me to the conclusion that one of my connections wasn't solid, so I probed point by point through the circuit, and noticed that one of my solders wasn't working. I then re-soldered it, and it works like a charm.