Hey guys. so i've got a kustom defender 5h amp head. i've had it now for about 3 months and with some mods and tube swaps, i've got it sounding perfect (for me and my ears). So far i've (not me, a guy i sent my amp to who did all mods i'm about to list) put a Classic Tone OT in there, recapped with sprague orange drop, added a standby switch, and added a tone and gain control. i'm completely satisfied with how the amp sounds. but.. honestly it's just kinda boring to look at.

I was prowling youtube about a half hour ago and found a vid of a guy who also modded his defender 5h. along with adding different controls to his amp, he had blue LEDs inside the amp. IMO, it looked awesome. just seeing the blue light oozing out of the amp immediately made me want to do the same. not just that, but it also matched the light for the on/off switch, which is awesome for my OCD. problem is, the guy was speaking some sort of middle eastern language. and browsing through the comments, i saw that he never responded to anyone who asked for a how-to (with english subtitles lol). and that brings me here to this fountain of knowledge.

I've found a place to get the LEDs. i'm going to buy them in strips, 5cm each strip, 3 LEDs per strip. i'm going to buy two strips and stick them on the left and right inside of the amp with the 3m adhesive backing (peel and stick). the product description states that resistors are built in, so all you have to do is add 12v of power and a ground. my question is...

Is there any way to tap into the amp itself for the 12v? so that when i turn my amp on and the on/off switch lights up, so does the inside of the amp. a detailed description of what exactly i'll need to do (and additional parts/supplies, if needed) would be amazing (as i'm a bit slow when it comes to electronics lol), but any advice would be apreciated.

Also, i'm aware of the potentially lethal voltage that lurks in tube amps, and i know how to safely discharge them. so please don't discourage me from this mod.. if it can even be classified as such haha. please and thanks!

I forgot to mention a couple of things. I have an orange ppc108 cab with an 8" "professional loudspeaker" in it. I hooked the Marshall up to that, and I still get the hum. I even tried swapping the "professional loudspeaker" in the orange cab with the 8" speaker that was originally in the Marshall before I converted it to a head. Still get the super loud hum. I have noticed however, when I play my guitar through the OD channel, the him seems to go away (but that could very well just be the way my ears perceive it). Also with my guitars vol. and tone controls turned to 0, the him is still there. The hum even stays when my guitar is unplugged from the amp. So by process of elimination, it HAS to be something within the amp. Am I wrong? Thanks again guys, I feel like even if this amp can't be fixed, I am learning a lot  :dbtu:

Hey roly. The combo I cut down to a head is just sitting on the base of what was the bottom of the combo. Essentially all I did in the conversion was cut the midsection out of the amp and glue it together with wood glue. I cut the baffle board to fit perfectly and used the old grill cloth to cover it. I cut the back part of the amp (don't know what it's called, but the part that made the combo a closed and not open back) to fit on the back just right, so there is no way the leds could be coming into contact with a light source. The project turned out better (cosmetically) then I had expected. When i added the extension cab output, i just drilled a hole in the back of the chassis to fit the speaker jack in. There are washers on both the inside of the chassis, and on the outside with the screw on nut holding it all in place. I even plugged a speaker cable in the ext. cab output when I had the chassis outside of the head to see if maybe the end of the cable or maybe part of the jack was coming into contact with anything inside the amp. Nope. I hope this helps you guys help me. And if I missed anything you asked or didn't answer fully, let me know.

On a completely unrelated topic.. today i was at a pawn shop, and I spotted a peavey bandit. It looked like an older model and it was loaded with a single 12" Sheffield (idk if I spelled that right) speaker. It was 80 watts and looked to be in good condition (at first glance). It had a tag on it for $250, which seemed decent to me. Upon further inspection I noticed the speaker cone was completely torn. I went and talked to one of the sales guys, and he said he would lower the price to $50, with a guarantee that I could bring it back in two days for a full cash refund. Is it worth it? I play any kind of rock, a fair bit of metal, and some clean stuff I write. Would this amp be worth my time and money to buy a replacement speaker for? Thanks guys

Hey roly, thanks for the welcome that's a pretty large snake! Let's be glad they're more afraid of us then we are of them, or that amp might have been the end of you! The worse thing I have ever found in an amp was a yellow jackets nest about the size of both my fists balled next to each other. And that's the story of how I discovered my allergy to bee stings! But hey, you take the bad with the good when the owner of a junkyard is a family friend, and let's you take most anything you want.

As for constructive criticism, I am ALL for that! That's what i love about all of this, there is always more to learn. But there's a fine line between that and being rude, insulting, and arrogant.

back to the amp. what is metho? As for DeOxIt, I've heard of it and know what it is, but I have no idea where I'd be able to get some. What about an electronics store like RadioShack?

Hey enzo. There is no difference with the reverb. I've turned it all the way up and down, and it has no effect on the hum 

another update: I have re-soldered all of the joints on the bottom of the PCB, no difference what-so-ever. No better, no worse

another note, I have an out of commission crate gx-60 amp that I could probably source for spare parts, if need be. I am currently trying to fix both amps, but the Marshall means more to me than the crate.

Update: so I just now turned the amp on and began poking around with a chopstick to try and find the culprit. the only thing I am getting (I have poked every cap and resistor, twice) is when I poke the resistor labeled D2, I also get a tapping sound out of my speaker cabinet. Does this mean the resistor needs replacing? I am now going to try to re-solder it to the board, in case it somehow came loose.

Well, that did nothing. Now I'm going to remove the board from the chassis and try touching up all of the solder joints to see if anything might have come loose. Will update again later, wish me luck.

Hey people.

So a couple years ago i was at a pawn shop, and was looking for a cheap marshall amp (i was in a "marshalls are the best, period!" phase, which i very quickly grew out of). i looked around and spotted the MG15CDR. i plugged up, played a couple of riffs, and dropped sixty bones for it (they wanted 70 but i pointed out the loose vol. knob and a small tear in the tolex) i took it home, tightened the vol. knob, and played the amp for about a week until i got sick of the way it sounded.

Fast forward to now. well, two weeks ago actually. i had chopped a squier sidekick (now named the SP-10, i believe) up and turned it into an 8 ohm head out of boredom. realising most of the not so musical sounds that were coming from that amp were the fault of the dinky, no-name 6" speaker, i decided to also convert my Marshall practice amp combo to an 8 ohm head. so i did, and the process went just as smoothly as the sidekick did. about one week ago i plugged into the marshall which was plugged into my 12" extension cab, and switched to the OD channel (something i had not done since the combo to head conversion. i had only played it clean). i first turned the volume on the OD channel up, and noticed a slight hum. on a side note, i was using a guitar with humbuckers, and the volume on the guitar was all the way down. also, the guitar i was playing with has never had any humming problems with any of my other amps. anywho.. i turned the gain up to about half way, and the hum got pretty intense. i tried cranking the gain all the way up to see how bad it would get and it got to the point of being unbearable. mind you, the volume for this channel was only on 2 of 10. if i turned it up anymore then that it started to feedback terribly. i was standing a few feet from my ext. cab so i thought that might be it. i backed away to the other side of my practice area. the feedback stopped, but the loud hum persisted. also, i use high quality cables running from my guitar to amp, and from amp to cab, so i've ruled that out. playing this amp on the clean channel sounds good (IMO) as it always has. it's just the OD channel that hums and gives me feedback

I've spent a fair bit of time with this amp, not to mention the time and effort of converting it from combo to head. so please don't advise me to get another amp. i have superior sounding amps. but this amp also has sentimental value for the time i've spent on modding it. i mainly use it for the CD/AUX input to play music on my phone, but i also run my guitar through it on occasion.

Does anyone have a diagnosis, or any tips to help me figure out what the problem is? i have decent electronics knowledge, and i'm okay with a soldering iron, so please don't advise me to take it to a tech. please, someone help me out. i can't stand to see one of my amps in such pain... haha. seriously though, any help would be greatly appreciated because, i'm stumped 

Well i have very recently joined this forum. recently as in, a couple minutes ago. i've tried a couple other forums (which will remain nameless) in which the people were very nasty. made (or tried to) make me feel stupid for using incorrect termanology, even when they knew exactly what i was talking about. i have been searching the net for an amp related forum with friendly, knowledgeable people, who will attempt to help me. not attempt to make me feel little. so, i found this forum, and read through some posts that interested me, and this forum (and the people) seem to fit the bill. now, to the amp in question.

The amp in question is a Crate GX-60 that was given to me by my next door neighbor. it had been his rig for quite some time and (i believe) was manufactured and purchased in the mid 90's. i was told that in the last couple of years the amp had started dying on him. upon further investigation (google is your friend, haha) i found numerous people saying Crates GX series was prone to reliability issues. my neighbor's complaints were that the amp just stopped working, period (he never went into detail, but i believe what happened to him is happening to me now). and he had stopped even trying to play through it for the last 6 months.

With everything he said in mind, i carried the amp home and began dissecting it. i pulled the amp loaded chassis from the cab and used compressed air to get everything that was calling the inside of the cabinet home, out. i inspected the amp itself, looking for bad caps, blown fuses, etc. everything looked to be in working order, so i reassembled and took it inside to see if it worked. i fired it up and put a G chord through the clean channel. it worked, and pretty darn fine too. the only thing i found that could be slightly percieved as "stopped working" in my hour or so of playing through it, was that on both channels the volume would sporadically increase and decrease on its own. either a slight increase, or a nearly complete decrease, where the amp could barely be heard. any advice on a fix for this?

Anywho, fast forward a couple of months. i turned the amp on and began to play. everything was fine, until out of nowhere it started squealing (i mean really squealing, enough for a temporary loss of hearing) like a stuck pig. immediately i unplugged it and the head scratching began. i pulled the chassis and inspected it for bad caps, blown fuses, etc. and again, everything looked fine.

so here i am today, asking for advice. how do i get this amp back in working order? i have since pulled the amp loaded chassis from the amp, turned the speaker cab into an 8 ohm extention cab for my amp heads (i don't own a 12" speaker cab at the moment, and the "Crate Special Design" speaker sounds good IMHO), and given up on the amp. but the amp had a good clean channel, NICE spring reverb, and took pedals like a BOSS (pun intended haha). i love fixing things, it's a passion of mine to take things apart, figure out how they work, and when i can, make them better then what they were. how do i get this bad boy back in working order? my goals are to get it to quit squealing, and fix the issue of self fluxuating volume. PLEASE HELP!

p.s. please don't advise me to buy another amp, scrap it for parts, or anything like that. i have other amps, better sounding ones (IMO). FIXING things is what i love. with that said, i hope everyone here is friendly and helpfull. and i hope to have a good time recieving and giving knowledge and advice to those in need.