Tag Archives: Tubes

Bassman Amp Design – CAD Model

Motivation

The recent find of some good looking 3/4″ plywood was the swift kick I needed to get the ball rolling on a long dormant project. A few years ago I started down the road of building a Fender Bassman clone based on the 5F6 circuit. I was going to do this remotely with a friend. He would handle some electronics analysis for some mods we had in mind, and I would guide the mod selection and build the cabinet. I even went so far as to buy a chassis.

Unfortunately the project never went much further and the chassis sat in the corner of my room for a long time. Then, looking for a CAD project to practice on, I picked it up and got a sheet metal part about 80% done. It was a full box with one of the three faces completed with punched holes.

Getting Started

Knowing I had the chassis model nearly done I started to put together a model of the plywood cabinet. I’ve never had much luck modeling larger assemblies from the ground up and wanted to try something new. I had heard the term “top-down” in relation to CAD models and it seemed like the way to go.

Step one was to do a little research on Fender cabinets similar to what I had in mind. I wanted to skip the 4×10 configuration the Bassman is known for in favor of a much more portable and apartment friendly 1×12 combo. I used a few pictures and drawings of the 4×10 configuration to get an idea for the parts involved, then changed the baffle design and size to fit a single 12″ speaker.

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Pignose G40V Backlog

A few years ago my best friend Nick asked me to do some mods to his amp. He’d recently acquired this cool little brown 40w 10 inch Pignose g40v. The design was very simple and followed an old Bassman schematic pretty closely. The mods that Nick had been eyeing would bring it even closer to the Bassman. He linked me to a couple of blog posts and schematics and I made my way to HSC, a local electronic component warehouse.

The original amp has been holding up well since and has survived him gigging around Utah. When he found another on on Craigslist he made sure to scoop it up and drop it off with me for an upgrade. The second overhaul followed the first very closely, but this time I left out the standby switch and I didn’t break the presence pot and replace it with something only kind of close in value.

I took pictures with the intention of doing a full write up, and one day maybe I will, but for now this project is stuck in the backlog. Enjoy the pictures in the meantime.