Skylark Faceplate with plenty of rust (click for fullsize image)

Now it’s not going to matter one bit if I don’t do anything about the looks, but it would be nice to get her cleaned up. There is no way I am going to be able to clean around the silk-screened lettering or lines. So the whole thing is going to have to come off. I don’t even know how you clean these things.

Now, the chassis is actually just a single piece of metal, bent and punched. I’m not sure if it’s steel or aluminum but either way, it’s easily bendable.
Here is a picture of one out of the cabinet :

5T Chassis out of cabinet and looking from behind

So I suppose I could just have one remade. That would surely cost more than the amp, but I’d come out of it with the specs for new metal, which would be a good thing for anyone else trying to do this. Then I would need to get the art redone or redesign something. Again.. favors or money and no improvement in the sound.

I’m leaning towards leaving it, for obvious reasons, but very early in the process I’ll have to make the decision.. anyone have any thoughts?

Finally, I crawled out of the shell and started looking for an amp I could play at home at night and also in a studio/practice situation. I settle on the “Lil’ Lanilei” by Tris at Songworks. However, that took some eight weeks to build and I was getting antsy …

Then I read about Clapton using the Gibson Skylarks in the studio. A little research turned up some interesting points: They sound great, are damn cheap and have very simple circuits.

Turns out the real ‘Class A’ single ended Skylarks are not so cheap. This one went for $255 + 40 shipping and that is as cheap as I’ve seen one go in a long time. 400+ is the usual. They look like this :

After a couple of weeks on ebay, I found two 60′s Crestline GA-5′s (well, one GA-5T (Tremolo) and one GA-5). These are both Gibson ‘Skylark’ amps, but not likely the kind used by Clapton They each cost 200 with shipping and both arrived with significant hum. New, they looked like this :

As the GA-5 arrived first, I worked on it first. I removed the old speaker wire and added a longer run of real speaker wire, and I replaced the power filter capacitors. That amp rocks. Simply fantastic clean at low volumes and great 60′s crunch as you turn the (only) dial. The other ‘dial’ is the on off switch.

The other one still has a nasty hum.. I’ll start telling that story soon.

My inaugural post on this blog is dedicated to the memory of this damn thing.

What is it? It is a network of resistors and capacitors in one funky square package. It has three leads coming out the bottom and was apparently made specifically for Gibson amps. This image is from the Gibson Master Service Manual (Hawk, pg. 318) and while hard to read, it’s also hard to mistake.

The circuit inside is just below it and shows values of 500 pF , 220k (for both resistors) and 0.0047 μF (5%). I have also seen this network drawn on a 50′s GA-5T schematic but I can’t find the schematic again. The pre-crestline 5T is pretty rare apparently. You can tell it’s the 50′s version because it has four tubes, not the 5 tube Crestline.

The 5 tube GA-5T Crestline is how I got into this mess, but that is another story.