Tym Shrunken Head amp

This is another one of my past exploits that I'm thinking of "re-issuing" since there's now a few companies making essentially the same thing. I'm not saying I was way ahead of the pack but ..................


I made this in the late nineties as an idea that came from wondering what would happen if you ................... This happens to me a lot. I think of things and then think "well, why can't it be done ?" Sometimes there's a good reason why it isn't already available. Sometimes not.

This is a forty watt guitar amp in a pedal enclosure. Like I say, there's a few of these available now but at the time I made this, I don't think it was being offered anywhere and it seemed like such a good idea I had to at least try it.

It's preamp was built on Veroboard and it uses a forty watt amp module as the power stage.


 


The "tone" is all the preamp and it's a simple single transistor preamp run straight into the forty watt module.

Running it on 12 Volts gave just over thirty watts and sixteen volts gave almost forty. It could still run off a Boss style nine volt adaptor but it only produces around twenty watts. This is still enough to run a quad box but with full sixteen volts it was loud enough to use live, especially into a twin cab with efficient speakers.



The enclosure is the standard Hammond style that the MXR Phase 100 is available in. It was light, small and used surprisingly little power as we found out when I made one for a guy who busked a lot and we hooked up two of the rectangular style "Dolphin" torch batteries to it giving it twelve volts that ran a speaker I built into his guitar flight case, ala Silvertone "amp in case" style.

This was a great little idea and the name came to me instantly. I wanted zombies and horror themed artwork but this was WAY before Tone was doing artwork and this was the best I could come up with. This would easily fit into my current pedal enclosure with some nice artwork so maybe it's time for the night of the living tiny guitar amps .................... Oooooohhhhhhhhh !!!!!

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