My Blues Jr. Mod / Repair - Home
October 2020
Fender Blues Jr. used cab
We bought a used Fender Blues Jr. chassis on eBay a few years ago, with the intention of building a cab for it, and getting it setup for our Daughter. Since then, we realized she really needed an amp with one channel setup for a microphone, and one for her guitar, and she now has one that does that. So this chassis has been sitting on a shelf waiting for a cab of some sort for a while. Recently, a customer brought in two Blues Jrs. for us to look at, both of which were having issues. The newer one really just needed tubes (one output tube was physically broken) - see that repair here. The other older one had more serious issues - burn issues around both output tube sockets on the circuit board, and damaged solder pads around one of the output tube sockets, so the customer decided not to have it repaired. We ended up trading some labor for the old amp, and used the cabinet for our chassis. The cab has a few small tears in the tolex, but, other than that and being a bit dirty, was in pretty good shape, and included the original Fender speaker.
We already had purchased a Fromel mod kit for this chassis, so we went ahead and installed it before mounting the chassis in the used cab. This was their basic mod kit that replaces most of the important capacitors, and a few other parts, including an all metal input jack. We also ordered a 'progressive' toggle switch from Mouser to replace the original power switch. This adds the 'Standby' function, which is healthier for the outputs (the original is just a simple 'On / Off' switch). This project was basically identical to the repair / mods we performed on this customers newer Blues Jr. III, which can, again, be seen here, so we will just show a few pictures of this project.
Bad wire bundling practice from the factory
Stock 'On/Off' switch from the factory
New metal input jack
New caps and wiring cleaned up
Modded Fender Blues Jr. back in a cab
Once we get the new power switch installed, we will also clean up the cab a bit. At that point, it should be a pretty decent little amp.