Peavey Bandit resurrection

jdbwales

I’ve recently picked up a silver stripe Peavey Bandit which has developed some issues on the gain channel and I’m wondering what the fixes may be. 

 The treble and post gain knobs are slightly intermittent, and a little loose - if you pull on them slightly there’s a thicker drive sound and a bit more volume, let go and you either get a quieter sound or nothing/static. 

Secondly, anything past 5/6 on the pre gain knob and you get a bit of an ‘artifact’ like an unpleasant fuzz on the notes. Before that it doesn’t sound too bad though - could just be the amp’s natural gain sound I guess? 

So basically, any advice on this other than the obvious - contact cleaner on all the pots and tighten the pots up? 

Thank you!

Funkfingers

Wobbly control knobs could be symptomatic of the PCB-mounted pots not being secure. This can only be checked properly by removing the amp chassis tray from the cabinet.

On some Peavey solid state guitar amplifiers, a wasp-in-a-jamjar raspy clipping is just the way they sound. 

ICBM

That will almost certainly be either just dirty pots, or at worst cracked solder joints on them. Try cleaning them with contact cleaner/lubricant first, and if that doesn’t fix it you’ll need to take the board out and check for bad joints.

jdbwales

Thanks gents - will get in there with the contact cleaner and iron if needed later!

jdbwales

@ICBM @Funkfingers  - I’ve got inside the Peavey finally and cleaned/tightened, everything is now bang on (amazingly, these things really do just keep on ticking) apart from one thing that I’ve found out was a big cause of noise - the reverb. When the verb is at 0, the amp is noise free and sounds surprisingly lovely, but turn it up and it gets very noisy very quickly. 

I have cleaned and tightened the reverb knob but the noise is still there. Any ideas? I think next I’ll try contact cleaners on the RCA plus on the tank?

Thank you both for the help so far. This is coming together nicely, tempted to spray the cabinet or recover it in some sort of ridiculous vinyl...

ICBM

Yes, noise from the reverb may well be a tank ground issue.

I can’t remember whether these are supposed to be grounded at both ends or only one. It’s also possible the tank is connected the wrong way round if someone has been at it...

jdbwales

I’ll try and investigate over the next few days and try a few things - weird as I had a Fender Performer with pretty much the same issue. I love reverb but it doesn’t seem to love me!