Maggie / Two Stroke Style Build Part 2

In this post I'll show some of the current status of the Maggie / Two Stroke build. The cabinet work is mostly complete as it's starting to get cold in the garage and I wanted to get the baffle painted and tolex work out of the way while I could. If you recall from part one of the build,  I had acquired a pair Tweed 5F2-A style raw cabs from a woodworker friend.  Here's a shot of the cabs he sent me while they were in his shop.

The both ended up having baffles for 12" speakers, but I wanted a 10" for the Lone Wolf 6L6SE amp, he was happy to oblige. 

Here's the cab for the Maggie / Two Stroke as it sits now.  I still have to make and tolex the back panels, and the jury is still out on what I want to use for the grill cloth.

This uses a tooled brown western style vinyl from a local Lens Mills fabric store.  

Since I had never tolexed prior to the 6L6SE project I followed a couple of YouTube videos by Uncle Doug.  They were very helpful. His YouTube channel is chock full of useful amp related videos.

Part 1

Part 2

I pretty much followed his methods and achieved pretty good results, I think.  Of course it was much easier on the second cabinet above, as I'd already gone through the steps previously. Both cabs were relatively easy to cover, less intimidating than I had originally thought. For glue I used Lepage Waterbased Contact Cement on both with very good results.

In my next post of this thread I'll look at building the chassis.

Making eyelet or turret board drill templates.

In this post I will show how I create a drill template for a 5F2-A eyelet or turret board using Corel Draw and an existing board as the starter.

First photograph and measure the board you want to template.

This board is approximately 7 1/4" (7.25)  X 2 5/8" (2.625). Next open up Corel Draw, I'm using version 12 here but any version would work. If your board is longer you can change the orientation of the page from portrait to landscape to make it fit. I usually change the defaults for the drawing to inches and setup rulers and grid lines to assist with the layout. Here I've drawn in the outline of the board using the rectangle tool.

Next I'll import the picture of the board and send it to the back so it's behind the rectangle I drew. Next I scale the image to fit the size of the rectangle. I've changed the colour of the rectangle to make it appear a little better in the screenshot.

Now I will drag down some guidelines from the ruler bars and align them on the straight rows of eyelets. Since the picture is slightly skewed the eyelets may not line up perfectly with the guidelines. So I use the guidelines to center the vector circles.  This shot shows the almost completed vector work. It really only takes a few minutes if you are comfortable with the drawing package.

The solid red circles are for the wire pass-through holes. Next I will delete background image and change all the line and fill colours to black so it prints nicer on my laser printer.

Here's a shot of the template ready to go to the printer.

This should work with any vector drawing program as as long as it will allow you to import a bitmap image as the guide.  You could also use images from layout drawings kicking around on the net as long as you have a rough idea of the size of board you are trying to template.

Maggie / Two Stroke Style Build Part 1

Back when I started the LW6L6SE  I had asked a good friend and woodworker to make me a finger jointed pine cabinet.   The cab was a narrow panel tweed style, taken from these plans I found online from Modulus Amplification for a Tweed Deluxe. I had him make it about 2 inches narrower than the plans, so it was closer to a Tweed Princeton in size.

He was nice enough to build a second one for me at that time! Said it was just as easy to run multiples while he had his finger joint jig setup in the table saw.  The pine was cheap enough so...

What to do with another Tweed Princeton size cab?  Since I  had wanted a new amp to plug in my Peavey PowerSlide and cheapo Strat copy, wasn't thrilled with the tone of my stock Epiphone Valve Junior combo and tend to like Fender amps I could just build a 5F2-A right?  But why not build something just a little bit different and maybe a little more versatile? So I decided to go with a design based on the Hunter Two Stroke and Weber Maggie.

The Two Stroke is an amp design and project featured in Dave Hunter's "The Guitar Amp Handbook" and if you are not familiar it's based on the 5F2-A circuit with a few tweaks thrown in.  The original (Hunter) design had paralleled octal sockets setup so you could run a pair of 6V6's, a single 6L6, EL34, KT66 or other tube in the same family for the power amp section.  On the preamp side a switchable set of cathode bypass caps to give some boost options to the single 12AX7, a fenderish flavour, a marshallish flavour, or no bypass cap on the first gain stage and the power supply uses a tube rectifier.

Hunter's original design and Weber's Maggie both use a 10" speaker combined with an 8" speaker. Victoria is now building the kits for the Two Stroke amp, and they have opted to go with a single 6L6GC and 12" speaker. The spare cab I have has a baffle for a 12" and I don't think I could possibly squeeze in the 10 and 8 combination, so I ordered a 12" 8 Ohm Eminence Cannabis Rex .  The speaker has received very good reviews by both guitar and harp players so I'll give it a shot in this amp.  I could always swap it out later if it's not really what I want.

I downloaded the schematic and layout for the Maggie as a starting point and ordered an 5F2-A eyelet board  for the project. The eyelet board will be measured photographed and eventually cloned for future projects. It's pretty easy to create drill templates in Corel Draw with a picture and  some measurements of an existing empty board or from a layout diagram.

The chassis I started with is an enclosure from Hammond it's aluminum 13" X 5" X 2", generous enough for the layout. Ordered some ClassicTone transformers spec'd for a Tweed Princeton, and already had most of the other components in my parts cabinet.

Part 2 the cabinet.