Several years ago, I bought some speaker cabinets (cheap) from the bass player in the band I was playing guitar for at the time. It was a Fender Bassman cab from the mid 60’s and a couple of those single 10 inch Marshall speaker cabs that make the little mini “Marshall Stack”. All the cabs had water damage and all the speakers had been removed from them. I refurbished the Fender cab right away. I re-fitted a new back panel, replaced the old Tolex with new, and installed Naylor speakers (it’s now matched up with a ’65 Bandmaster head and sounds unbelievable). I also loaded the little Marshall cabs with Jensen Special Design C10Q speakers, but I never got them looking good. Side note: I hope I don’t get chastised too badly for loading Marshall cabs with Jensens, but I really like the sound of Jensen ceramics . It turns out all the Marshall’s really needed was just a good cleaning and new grill cloth.
Below is a before and after of the cabs, after I cleaned up and “re-clothed” one of them. I used “magic erasers” (little white cleaning sponges) to get the logo and piping clean and white. If you’ve never used Magic Erasers before, get some! They work really well for getting stains off hard surfaces around the house (and white Marshall logos as well). I used Oz Cream Polish to clean the tolex. I also highly recommend “Oz” If you have a tolex covered amp, guitar case or whatever. It’ll make your amp look brand new. I didn’t quite get the cloth on perfectly straight, but its pure black cloth and only a small area to cover so you don’t notice it, unless you are looking at it closely.
Now I have a nice little “stack” for my old Epiphone Valve Jr. amp. This stack sounds great! There is no “clean” sound from this rig, the Valve Jr., doesn’t “Clean Up” unless it’s on barely audible volume level. I previously had the Valve Jr. paired up with a single 12″ speaker cab, but this stack really cranks out an awesome full sound!
There is a problem that I had to address to get this stack working. The Epiphone amp has one speaker output jack (per ohm value) and each of the cabs also has one jack. So how do I hook up both cabs? I found the jack-cone-part for the back panel is available to buy and I thought about putting an extra jack on the back of one of the cabs to “chain” them together. I decided to keep the cabs stock.
In my next blog I’ll show how I addressed this problem using a little DIY speaker patch box. and I’ll demo the sound of this stack.
JD Sleep
General Guitar Gadgets