Solid State Guitar Amp Forum | DIY Guitar Amplifiers

So, I bought a Vox Pathfinder 10 this week in pretty good shape. Looks brand new, came in the original box and everything. Then I tried playing with it...

With the switch on clean it sounded nice, but once I tried using the drive it sounded really crappy. It also had a bad treble pot (it scratched and cut out the sound between zero and 1/2 way on the knob). So, I opened it to see what I could do about the pot.

Surprise surprise, someone modded it putting two diodes in place of the LEDs (ge and si), and did a very crappy job too. The pads in the pcb for the LEDs were pretty much history. I think only one diode was actually in contact with the copper and that explained the crappy drive sound.
Thankfully I was able to restore it to have the original red LEDs in there and it sounds much better now! Then I put a 100k pot replacing the bad 50k (that's what I had available). Really digging it now!!!

But after all that, I remembered the oh so famous LED mod some people do, where you would remove the LEDs from the circuit to get a more "natural" sound. I discovered you can achieve that without having to open the amp!

Simply slide a piece of plastic or metal in the space between the drive switch knob and the hole in the chassis so it stays in place when you move it (before it clicks). Slowly push it until you find the sweet spot where the LEDs are not switched in but the boost is active. Boom, LED mod without even touching a screwdriver!

 :dbtu:

ditto  :dbtu:

i haven't chanced opening my PF10 yet to do the LED mod. I'll try your method first.

Quote from: mguzzo on August 10, 2015, 04:23:31 PM
i haven't chanced opening my PF10 yet to do the LED mod. I'll try your method first.

It's a good way to try it out and see if you like it, without fear of damaging the board.
It's not gonna be permanent of course (unless you, like, glue the spacer pieces in place or something like that, which I wouldn't really recommend).