How much to mod the crapness out of a Blues Jr ?

NelsonP

Just sell it and buy a Boss Katana instead 

octatonic

TimmyO said:

Decided on a Princeton instead 

Good idea.

Guitar_Slinger

TimmyO said:

Guitar_Slinger said:

Don't forget an early multi-FX and tonesucker© hat for soloing.

man that was so funny - how long ago is it now? 15 years? The night that @noisepolluter and @Estheroid first made contact, and @WYNIR0 soiled himself in public hahah 

Great night.   For those not there,  we (as above plus Bertie and supernovaa from the Music Radar days) went for a drink at a blues jam in central London... The Spice of Life.

The room was about the size of a single decker bus and IIRC there were 3 tweed valve amps, all mic'd up.

One guy in particular was wearing a hat and would step on a Zoom or something to solo, using the SCOM fizzy-reverb-delay patch, that was quieter than his rhythm playing. Supernovaa coined the Tonesucker hat phrase, wyniro spilt a pint on his crotch and two of the others (finally) hooked up. 

Spoiler alert: it wasn't me and Bertie.

noisepolluter

Guitar_Slinger said:

TimmyO said:

Guitar_Slinger said:

Don't forget an early multi-FX and tonesucker© hat for soloing.

man that was so funny - how long ago is it now? 15 years? The night that @noisepolluter and @Estheroid first made contact, and @WYNIR0 soiled himself in public hahah 

[...] two of the others (finally) hooked up.  

To any American forumites who may now be labouring under a rather startling misapprehension, I must emphasise that Musicradar meetups were not *that* rowdy. 

TimmyO

noisepolluter said:

Guitar_Slinger said:

TimmyO said:

Guitar_Slinger said:

Don't forget an early multi-FX and tonesucker© hat for soloing.

man that was so funny - how long ago is it now? 15 years? The night that @noisepolluter and @Estheroid first made contact, and @WYNIR0 soiled himself in public hahah 

[...] two of the others (finally) hooked up.  

To any American forumites who may now be labouring under a rather startling misapprehension, I must emphasise that Musicradar meetups were not *that* rowdy. 

eeh lad, this were Intermusic, none of that modern Musicradar claptrap, I remember when this were all fields (etc etc) 

noisepolluter

TimmyO said:

noisepolluter said:

Guitar_Slinger said:

TimmyO said:

Guitar_Slinger said:

Don't forget an early multi-FX and tonesucker© hat for soloing.

man that was so funny - how long ago is it now? 15 years? The night that @noisepolluter and @Estheroid first made contact, and @WYNIR0 soiled himself in public hahah 

[...] two of the others (finally) hooked up.  

To any American forumites who may now be labouring under a rather startling misapprehension, I must emphasise that Musicradar meetups were not *that* rowdy. 

eeh lad, this were Intermusic, none of that modern Musicradar claptrap, I remember when this were all fields (etc etc) 

I ‘ad ter bloody well live in a Flextone bastard III extension cabinet, and I were grateful fer that

longjaw

Jalapeno said:

Sell the BJ and get a Pro Junior or PRRI

This.

TimmyO

TimmyO said:

Decided on a Princeton instead 

menamestom

I A-B'd my Princeton with a Blues Junior recently, it's not night and day difference but the PRRI sounded bigger and (sorry for the old and nearly meaningless cliché) more 3D.  There was also more clarity and sweeter breakup.  
But currently prefer my 5E3 over either!

twang46

Aha ! a lot of B.Junior's bashing going on here......

I don't see the problem with these amps (apart from the shop new price) but I was able to buy a very lightly used immaculate MK III for well under £300 the other week that the previous owner had fitted a Ruby reverb tank to

Some simple mods that cost well under £10 for parts (mainly caps) & some time spent dressing leads is all you need to make this amp sound better & reduce the "noise"

I always fit a lower gain valve in V1 (Jan Phillips 5751 12ax7)  & ditch the "Fender" EL 84's for a matched pair of JJ 's & seeing as it's for my own use I bought a Hammond 1760 TX for this one & fitted a Celestion G12 Century (Vintage) that I already had

The result is a volume control that works with a realistic sweep so you can play at "bedroom" volume if you wish & I like the way the neo magnet Cele works in this amp.

If I had to buy the speaker/valve's as well as the TX it would probably be uneconomic to most folks pushing the cost up around £500 or so using a S/H base unit

I like Blues Juniors & seeing as it's Fenders best selling amp by some distance (as well as the best selling guitar amp in the country I believe) a lot of people agree with me 

They are not for everybody of course but I like them 

Cheers

D.

Doctorfunk

There's a very quick mod that Blues Junior owners can do that costs nothing and saves on valves and reliability in the long run. All Blues Juniors are wired for 230v causing the valves to run hot and burn out quicker than they should and eventually damage the board. To remedy this you can rewire it to 240v which involve moving a couple of wires on the mains power switch. I did to my BJIII and it made it much more usable. Full deatils of how to do it can be done can be found on various sites but the one I used was the Rat Electronics web site.

ICBM

Doctorfunk said:

There's a very quick mod that Blues Junior owners can do that costs nothing and saves on valves and reliability in the long run. All Blues Juniors are wired for 230v causing the valves to run hot and burn out quicker than they should and eventually damage the board. To remedy this you can rewire it to 240v which involve moving a couple of wires on the mains power switch. I did to my BJIII and it made it much more usable. Full deatils of how to do it can be done can be found on various sites but the one I used was the Rat Electronics web site.

It also slightly improves the sound, in my opinion.

You can do this to any modern Fender amp that has a multi-tap transformer - which is most, although the Pro Junior is one of the exceptions - and it's always better, the amp runs cooler and more reliably, and usually sounds clearer.

The reason is that under EU law, all electrical goods must be supplied to run at 230V. But since the EU 'voltage harmonisation' is in fact a fudge - no countries actually changed from either 240V or 220V to 230V, they simply changed how those voltages were defined by tolerance, to bring them into a new '230V' range - the UK actually still has 240V. So the amps actually run slightly too hot when set to 230 - this matters most on things like the Blues Junior which runs the valves quite hot, or the Devilles which run them at very high voltages, but it's worth changing any amp where it's possible to.

It's done by swapping two wires on the PCB, or sometimes the power switch, which are push-connectors so don't need any special tools. Check the schematic to see which ones, but it's usually the plain black and white/black wires from the PT. You will sometimes have to cut a cable tie on the bundle of wires to get enough slack to do it, but no worse than that.

noisepolluter

ICBM said:

Doctorfunk said:

There's a very quick mod that Blues Junior owners can do that costs nothing and saves on valves and reliability in the long run. All Blues Juniors are wired for 230v causing the valves to run hot and burn out quicker than they should and eventually damage the board. To remedy this you can rewire it to 240v which involve moving a couple of wires on the mains power switch. I did to my BJIII and it made it much more usable. Full deatils of how to do it can be done can be found on various sites but the one I used was the Rat Electronics web site.

It also slightly improves the sound, in my opinion.

You can do this to any modern Fender amp that has a multi-tap transformer - which is most, although the Pro Junior is one of the exceptions - and it's always better, the amp runs cooler and more reliably, and usually sounds clearer.

The reason is that under EU law, all electrical goods must be supplied to run at 230V. But since the EU 'voltage harmonisation' is in fact a fudge - no countries actually changed from either 240V or 220V to 230V, they simply changed how those voltages were defined by tolerance, to bring them into a new '230V' range - the UK actually still has 240V. So the amps actually run slightly too hot when set to 230 - this matters most on things like the Blues Junior which runs the valves quite hot, or the Devilles which run them at very high voltages, but it's worth changing any amp where it's possible to.

It's done by swapping two wires on the PCB, or sometimes the power switch, which are push-connectors so don't need any special tools. Check the schematic to see which ones, but it's usually the plain black and white/black wires from the PT. You will sometimes have to cut a cable tie on the bundle of wires to get enough slack to do it, but no worse than that.

Does this also apply to DRRI, and if so would it need rebiasing afterwards? 

ICBM

noisepolluter said:

Does this also apply to DRRI, and if so would it need rebiasing afterwards? 

Yes, and probably not. The two wires to swap are the white/black and black, on P2 and P8.

noisepolluter

ICBM said:

noisepolluter said:

Does this also apply to DRRI, and if so would it need rebiasing afterwards? 

Yes, and probably not. The two wires to swap are the white/black and black, on P2 and P8.

Cheers John - maybe one to request at next service

p90fool

I did that to my Princeton and my Hot Rod Deluxe, it's simple enough. 

noisepolluter

p90fool said:

I did that to my Princeton and my Hot Rod Deluxe, it's simple enough. 

Did you notice any difference in sound/noise floor? When I had a blues junior and did the connector swap it ran noticeably cooler and with less idle buzz, so would be interested in doing it for DRRI, not that it’s an especially noisy amp, but cooler innards would be good in any case.

p90fool

noisepolluter said:

p90fool said:

I did that to my Princeton and my Hot Rod Deluxe, it's simple enough. 

Did you notice any difference in sound/noise floor? When I had a blues junior and did the connector swap it ran noticeably cooler and with less idle buzz, so would be interested in doing it for DRRI, not that it’s an especially noisy amp, but cooler innards would be good in any case.

Not particularly if I'm honest, I was happy enough knowing that it was running under a little less stress, especially at unknown wall voltages in various venues late at night. 

The last time I measured my house voltage at around 6pm a few weeks ago it was 246V, but who knows what you'd get at some random country pub.