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I added a cooling fan to my tube bass head


Jimbilly

Question

Posted

A couple of years ago I picked up a derelict '69 Plush all tube head, the tubes were good (Mullards and blackplate rca6l6s), but there was so much corrosion in and on the chassis that it did not appear to be servicable (per my tech). So he rebuilt it as a two channel 100w head, one channel is pretty much a Dual Showman, the other has more gain using some Mesa style circuits and switches.

It turned out great, but there's not much clearance inside the box, and I can't even get the taller 6L6s in there, plus the part of the box above the power tubes gets a bit hot. We added an aluminum plate as a heat shield, but I wanted to move a little air to cool things off.

I parted out my old pc and got a couple of 12vdc fans, it seemed WAY less complicated to just add a socket that I could plug a standard 9vdc wall wart into to power the fan. My tech was kind enough to supply the socket and the L bracket, all I had to do was install. So here it it, I ran it for a while today, - just enough air movement and no noise into the amp.

(Note the cool bias probe test points for each power tube, using a standard multimeter).

Plushwithfan.jpg

Plushwithfan2.jpg

2 answers to this question

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Posted

Cool! I had this idea before when I had problems with my Princeton Recording. Since I had discovered that the problems weren't temperature driven, I forgot about it.

I was wondering about fan noise. How's about that?

Posted

I did the same thing to my old SWR SM-400....worked like a charm...that amp used to get so hot that you literally had to wait 20-30 minutes after shut down to handle it...

12v computer fans work great with little to no appreciable noise...nicely done!!!

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