It started with a suitcase carried by a friend's father in WW2. He was stationed on the submarine USS Bowfin. Bruce's (excellent) idea was to put an amplifier inside the suitcase.



So for this one I painted the chassis in "hammered" copper. It's okay, but makes applying decals tricky since it's not a perfectly flat finish. Because, you know, it's "hammered". I bought the chassis from Seaside Chassis, a good guy up in Nova Scotia.



The iron is mounted. Once again, they are pulled from a Webcor reel to reel.



The Webcor units tend to use a standup power, but lay-down output transformer set. Just opposite of more modern stuff.



The cap cans and sockets installed, along with my rather convoluted diode board. I do it differently nowadays.



As you can see, the wire leads are solid core instead of stranded. It was stiff as hell after all these years too.



Moving along, wiring up...



I had to make this chassis skinnier than normal, so I compensated by having it deeper (3") and then double deckered some stuff. Like filter cap board.



And this dude was the cathode array for one of the preamp tubes, IIRC.



Yep, there it is! Over there!





A multi switch for cathode caps, I think... differing the bass response.



Closer and closer...



And that filter cap board is in it's little bunk now. If I did it again, those would be on the bottom board instead.



With the stacked stuff, and everything crammed in, I really expected this to be a little "hummy"... but it wasn't. Nice and quiet (till you hammer the chords)



And finito! And it worked the first time I fired it up!



But what made this amp special was Bruce's attention to the porthole. He tracked a fellow out in Michigan (IIRC) who handles all sorts of stuff, and came up with this gem. It's aluminum to keep the weight down, but looks great.





Opened up for rock n roll.





Bruce did the work on the suitcase and installed his speaker of choice. This was my first project using spring reverb instead of solid state. I'm still trying to decide which I like best.


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