Sultone Blues Junior Amp Head Mod

I have a couple of Bills speaker cabinets, and he also builds his own line of amps. I had some blues Jr. spare parts laying around (faceplate, reverb tank, PC board), and Bill offered to put it in a chassis and one of his hardwood cabs, re-cap and re-tube (US NOS Vintage Tubes) and use a vintage hammond output transformer. It's a head only cabinet, no speaker. My final price for all of this was a little over $400, a great deal. The cabinet is beautiful, mahogany with a flame maple center stripe. It's compact, lightweight and has plenty of power, and it's great to have the option to use different speaker cabinets. He also re-wired the output jacks so I can use 4, 8 or 16 ohm cabs.

The amp sounds fantastic, a nice smooth overdrive without the need for any pedals. Smooth and warm. A big improvement over the old stock blues junior, which sounded really good to begin with. Cleans up nicely with just the guitar volume knob. The master volume gives me a useable overdrive tone at living room practice levels. The amp has started to develop a 60Hz hum when it's first turned on that seems to disappear after it warms up, could be a tube or a cap that needs replacing. Unfortunately, the reverb was broken when the amp arrived, I just get a really loud 60Hz buzz when I turn up the reverb. It's probably just a wire that got loose during shipping, but I'm going to get the amp to a local tech to get that and the 60Hz hum problem squared away.

I've had it on a few gigs and it's been great, but I'd never use it without a backup. Time will tell, but I'll be using it a lot because I really like the tone of the amp.

Bill is a wonderful craftsman and he gave me a great deal on this rig. However, it took an act of congress to finally get it shipped. The first cab I had ordered from Bill in 2003 got to me right on schedule, the next one took at least 2x his original commitment date, but I had to threaten a lawsuit to get this project shipped. A 6 week original commitment from Bill turned out to be a 5 month ordeal. Phone calls and e-mails e-mails went unanswered for weeks, except when I filed a complaint with PayPal, then I got a response within a day. It is a shame, because he does such nice work, and seems like a very sincere person. But, I'd rather pay a premium and get my stuff on time. I hope Bill is able to improve on this aspect of his work.

Bottom line is the amp sounds fantastic and was a great deal. I would have given it 10's across the board if it I had recieved better customer support.