I’ve fallen behind on posting – it’s December already! I hope you all had a safe and enjoyable Thanksgiving. We had a great day with a Thanksgiving potluck feast with friends at Mike and Jodi Hall’s house. We watched football while Mike and I enjoyed cigars and, of course, ate lots of good food.

I received an unexpected piece of mail from my sister before Thanksgiving. It was a publication of the US Navy called Crossroads from November of 1962 – it took me back in time to another Thanksgiving. In November of 1962, I was six years old and our family lived on the island of Guam. Guam is a US territory in the western Pacific (Micronesia). The tropical island has an area of 210 square miles and great beaches with coral reefs.

I learned to snorkel inside the reefs when I was five years old and still love snorkeling in the ocean whenever I can. On November 11, 1962, Typhoon Karen hit the island dead-center. It was the most powerful tropical cyclone to ever hit the island and the 185-mph winds were devastating. The 20-page Crossroads paper my sister, Cori, sent me was entirely devoted to coverage of the typhoon and its aftermath. She had kept it for almost 60 years – I had no idea.

The island was wrecked – 95% of the homes were damaged or destroyed and more than 45,000 people were left homeless. We were lucky – we got through the storm without damage to our home after a long, scary night in total darkness. In the morning, we found twisted metal wreckage in our backyard – someone’s carport had been swept up by the wind, twisted into an unrecognizable shape and deposited in our yard.

Along the highway, we saw fishing vessels – sizable boats – along the roadside more than a quarter of mile away from the marina.

Rear Admiral John F. Coye, Jr wrote, “We in Guam have learned the true meaning of Thanksgiving Day. We have witnessed the devastating forces of nature, and our lives have been spared. Let us pause for a prayer of thanks and redouble our efforts to rebuild Guam. Guam was good and we’re going to rebuild it better.”

It was hard to believe only 11 people lost their lives amid all of the destruction. We left Guam soon after the typhoon and moved back to California. If you’re interested in reading more about the typhoon, here’s a link to a Wikipedia article.

I wrote about the oscilloscope I bought in a previous post. It’s something I’ve wanted for a long time. When I was younger, oscilloscopes were very expensive instruments – even a Radio SHack Heathkit model would set you back about two weeks worth of wages. Nowadays, digital technology can make them inexpensive – the Rigol model I bought was under $300. I’ve been having fun playing around with it – it’s nice to be able to visually track the electronic signal through various stages of amplification in my guitar amps. Donna thinks I’ve become a bit of a nerd watching YouTube videos to learn how to effectively utilize the oscilloscope.

One of the things I found was I had deferred maintenance for too long on a couple of my amps. I had replaced vacuum tubes in my Trainwreck and Marshall 18-Watt amps that I built nine or 10 years ago, but that’s about all I did. Time plus wear and tear from riding in the basement of our motorhome took a bit of a toll. I could see some noise in the signal path and could also hear how they were noisy compared to the Trinity OSD I recently built.

I took a little time to re-solder a few components and used a product called DeoxIT to clean the tube sockets and potentiometers. Much better! I watched a YouTube video where Mike Zaite – designer and owner of Dr. Z Amplification described his recommended annual maintenance. I’ll put that schedule in place for future maintenance of my amps. He also said why he uses vintage Russian military spec vacuum tubes in his Maz18 amps. He likes them because they sound good and are very robust – he thinks they should last at least 5,000 hours. He has a large stockpile of tubes that he bought from a retired Russian military officer – I wonder how that guy came upon a large quantity of surplus military tubes.

I saw another video where Mark from Gary’s Guitars in Portsmouth, New Hampshire went on about the old Russian military vacuum tubes. He once lived in Russia and he said every major city had radio parts swap meets at the time. Buying a transceiver in Russia wasn’t easy back then. People would scrounge parts and build them. He is a big fan of the old tubes from the Foton factory (it burned down in the early 1970s) and the Reflektor factory.

Gary said to look for a code which is OTK plus a number. That indicates the tube was inspected and passed military specification. In the old days, the quality control inspectors for the military were very thorough – passing a defective tube would result in a new assignment in Siberia. He also showed how to read the date codes. A while back, I bought some Reflektor 6V6 equivalent tubes that I thought were from the late 70s or early 80s. After checking the date code, I see they’re from 1974 – the year I graduated high school.

I found some old Russian military EL84 equivalents on eBay that are what I use in the Marshall 18 Watt. I ordered four of them and they came from the Ukraine! These are dated 1972 and are from the same Reflektor factory and have OTK codes. I read the Reflektor plant produced up 50 million tubes per year back in its heyday.

Now that I had my amps back up to snuff, I suddenly heard noise and sound dropping out while I was playing my guitar. Then it quit making sound altogether. Wouldn’t you know it, my Stratocaster-style guitar that I built last month was on the fritz.

I did some trubleshooting and found problems in the treble bleed circuit. I replaced the resistor and capacitor there – I always fix anything I find out of order when troubleshooting – but that wasn’t the problem. An open treble bleed circuit wouldn’t stop the signal from getting out of the guitar. I played around with it for a whole day and the problem was intermittent. It would work fine on the bench, but once I put it all back together, it quit working again.

The problem seemed to be centered around the volume potentiometer. I ordered a new pot from Amazon and got it the next day. I checked it and it was fine, so I installed it and it wasn’t fine. It seems like the wiper or carbon strip inside warped when I soldered it. This puzzled me as I know I didn’t overheat it – I’ve soldered lots of pots. I looked at the CTS branded pot more closely and I suspect it’s a Chinese counterfeit, not a genuine CTS pot. Yesterday, I drove to west Mesa and bought a volume pot at Milano’s Music. This was a CTS genuine article.

I installed the pot and replaced the wiring from the pot to the output jack. It works again! I plugged into my Dumble-style OSD and made lots of noise – I mean music. By the way, I never believed I would play or own an amplifier that I liked better than my Trainwreck-inspired amp, but the Dumble-style OSD tops it. It’s my all-time favorite.

Monday night, Donna made a new dish for dinner – it was Creole shrimp. It was bit labor-intensive with thinly sliced celery, onions and peppers, but it was so tasty.

I won’t be eating such fancy dishes over the next few days. Donna’s flying to San Diego tomorrow morning to visit her sister, Sheila. She’ll be back on Saturday night.

The weather cooled considerably over the past week. We had highs around 70 degrees and overnight lows in the upper 40s. The week ahead calls for upper 70s to low 80s with overnight lows in the mid 50s. December in the Valley of the Sun – you gotta love it.