I recently had to opportunity to bring home an original, very near mint condition, 1965 Fender Blackface Deluxe Amplifier replete with intermittent original footswitch for the vibrato, two pronged power cable, the death cap, and an OEM AlNICo Speaker made by Oaktron. Having owned a 1968 Princeton non reverb before I was aware of the goings on inside the circuit of this great amp. The filter caps are known to have a lifecycle of ten years so this gem would need those replaced. The original wiring has the power cord constructed that there is no ground and should the circuit short out it would do so via a capacitor grounded to the chassis of the amp (which you’d be plugged into and a conduit for it to leave). This can kill you so you must BE CAREFUL when working inside of an amp. There are voltages that can kill you if you are cavalier with regards to safety. Take all amp work to a qualified tech if you have no clue. There’s no point in killing yourself or messing up the amp if you don’t what you’re doing.
Back to the amp, I installed a new three prong grounded power cable and removed the death cap. I also replaced the filter and bias caps with new drop ins of the original values.
The original speaker wasn’t too great. It had an okay compression when driven but lacked bottom end and the crispness I expected on the top. To remedy this I modified a British made Celestion Greenback 55Hz by adding four more holes to the speaker-frame. This prevented the removal of the grill cloth and the original eight speaker screws which I thought was a bad idea given how great this old dame looks and sounds.
1965 Fender Blackface Deluxe-Amp
To top it off I retubed it with a matched pair of NOS GE 6V6s and the OEM Mullard GZ34 the amp shipped with in February of 1968 as the 5th one off the line. I’m still pinching myself over having such a great tone machine and piece of history in my gear.
The transition from Fender to CBS was taking place when these amps came out and not many of the Non-Reverb Deluxes were made especially in Blackface Cosmetics because the demand from players was an amp with reverb. The genius of Leo’s design for this era deluxe (AA763) is that the two channels Normal and Vibrato can be jumped like the tweed deluxe that preceded them. Doing this provides a fat, juicy tone that swells and ebbs like no other when the vibrato (it’s actually tremolo but that’s another story) is engaged and the greenback is in full throat.
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