Fender Deluxe Reverb II repair.

Hope you all had a good break. I certainly did.

Having not seen a Rivera-era Fender for several months we had two Deluxe Reverb II amps in for repair within a couple of weeks! Amazingly they both had faults with there speakers, which we replaced.

As I’m sure you know, Paul Rivera was employed by CBS/Fender in the early 80s to revamp their amp line. As well as bringing in a range of new amps with features such as channel switching and high gain channels, Fender also upped their game with respect to construction, and, in my opinion, this era of Fender amps are the most sturdily built.

Whilst the lead channel isn’t to everyone’s taste, these amps can still be picked up at a reasonable price, and are good value for money.

Anyhow, here’s a chassis shot of one of the amps. Typical Fender eyelet board construction.

The grid wire to one of the output valves had not been soldered on at the factory. Amazingly this wasn’t the problem with the amp, although I did solder this.

One area of weakness in the DRII (and the Princeton Reverb II) is the 47 Ω resistor that feeds the bias supply. This is only a 0.5 W rated part so is prone to failure; and as bias supply failure is not good, I always change this resistor to a higher rated component.

The “burnt” resistor in the photo below is not the original resistor, and so must have been installed during a previous repair. Needless to say, the replacement resistor seems to be as “shandy” as the original, so I replaced this with a 5W cement box.

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