Apparently this standard of work is what to expect in the repair industry according to amp techs. Am I the only one who finds this to be a sloppy repair job and think techs should be able to do better?
Like to get input from you guys.
SA amp repair standards
V8 Yep....
I wanted to get some opinions as the tech who did it say it's fine. Took my amp to the gear junkie as their amp repairs had always been goo or so I assume. Yet received the amp back like that (not the only issue but just that is unacceptable to me).
Took the amp to Karel Mars for an assessment (as my opinion as client carries no weight) and he said there is nothing wrong with the repair work that had been done, or anything else.......so I wanted to test if I'm the crazy one, expecting something that's unrealistic. Graham even asked that I pay him back the refund he gave me (because Karel said the work is fine like that) the best I could do was to agreed to pay R150 for the parts used and paid him that.
I really thought I might be a difficult client not happy with the amp[ repair......and should be happy with that
It does not look very neat...
The general opinion might be " does it work? then it's good"? No major damage, all good? But you pay for professional work?
I know somebody who works on, builds, fixes valve amplifiers, he has done some lekker Hi-Fi amps through the years, and is currently building a few interesting amps.
He once sent me pictures of an amp he had to repair, an amp built by one of the more well known and revered builders, and it was a nightmare. There is no way to establish whether that work was done by the builder, or the mess was the result of somebody else working in it, but I can assure you, it was a disgrace. Even I can do better.
So, yes, sometimes you can expect sloppy work, it seems.
But it should not be condoned.
7 days later
- Edited
OD1 Hey Bud, I did pop in and ask the Junkies about what happened wrt your amp.
It was a tricky repair and was outsourced to the repair guy they use (P.s. the same guy all the local WC music retailers use for their repairs too). He's also worked on a few things for me as well.
Unfortunatley, your expectations were not met - from what I understand it was a tricky repair and I now know I would have done far worse.
From what I understand, the amp wasn't functioning at all, you'd initially attempted a repair yourself and then sent the amp in for repair. The amp was working post repair - not that the ends neccesarily justify the means!
But from what I heard you were dealt with professionally and fairly, as I have always felt when dealing with the Gear Junkie - and I have done many, many, many deals with Graham.
So, sad to hear that you had a negative experience, but to be fair, from my decade of dealing with them this is the very rare exception.
a month later
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Cerise It'll be harder to find them - I know of one guy who does work privately, but only really likes working on old/vintage tube amps (he's just turned 40). He's just moved to East London, so if anyone does need something done in the EC, he's your guy.
There's definitely still a interest out there (and tons of information), but they don't advertise their services - it's word of mouth.
I did eventually have a chance tp show my B.I.L OD1's photo's and he was unimpressed - He reckoned the de-soldering braid probably left behind a bunch of flux residue which could be carefully washed off using the appropriate cleaner. He's got over 30 yrs experience in the electrical component deisgn & manufacturing industry - he's seen it all, got me thinking you'll seldom find that kinda experience in a amp tech.
3 months later
I've been a long time customer buying pedals etc at the junkie, and like you say have always been good service, no issues and I was a fan.
What I did was replace a opamp in the amp, a TL071 instead of a TL061 (i thought being a single op amp it should be fine) what I didn't know is the 061 is a lower current one, so I suspect when replacing the opamp too much current went through and burnt some components. I was planning to repair it myself, but thought I would take it to junkie and let someone repair it properly.
I measured components on the board and gathered that a few resistors had burnt out, and suspected a transistor or two, so honestly not that difficult to repair. I gave the tech a printed schematic of the amp, exactly the symptoms and what I did to make his life easier When I received the amp it was noisy, and i mean unusable noisy. There had been no time constraints and it terms of budget I said the value of what I paid for the amp.
I dont want to post the emails here, but honestly the junkie, graham and karel never acknowledged the sloppy work done - gaslit me to the point where I thought maybe i'm being too pedantic about the amp. But honestly, a spade is a spade and all I wanted was the amp to be fixed yet I had to convince everyone that there is something wrong with the amp......I asked the tech to please clean the pots with de-ox, solder the earth connection to the tab on the iec socket and chassis and the most important thing, have a look at the normal clean channel as that is the only channel i use, as it sounded weird. It was there a month or more, none of those things had been done, I took my amp to karel to get those things done, and he asked me R1 800 for that.
It was such a distasteful, condescending and to out it frank....shit experiences that I will never in my life buy anything from junkie (which i'm actually sad about, but I can't support them anymore) or karel. Why should a customer have to struggle if the work was done the way it was, it could have easily been avoided - all of this.
It looked like a rush job,I suspect he didn't even pull the pcb to replace the transistor - if he did, he would have cleaned the pots as well. He broke clips on the pcb, left it covered with those solder splatter which stuck to the pcb as it semi melted into it......I didn't send the amp like that to him.....didn't attempt to clean it afterwards. So I ask you, if you receive something like that doesn't that say something about the guy doing the work. No time constraints I said keep it as long as needed to fix it properly.
I did mention to Graham that I am grateful because it was so unpleasant that I took the plunge and started learning to build valve amps, and to date built a 1 watt champ, and now a proper one, a marshall 20w 2203. At least something positive came from it, my feeling after all of it......is just unnecessary.....
- Edited
I found the video when i got the amp back from the gear junkie, this is what it sounded like. I plugged into different plugs in other areas of the house. used different cables, after I received it back (taking the amp to Karel and he did the things I initially asked the tech to do at the gear junkie) and the earth connections had been soldered, this disappeared.
The buzz followed the volume knob and was as loud or louder than the guitar volume, so basically not a useable amp imo. But listen for yourself.
I wanted a amp I can use, I didn't care who was to blame, just wanted it fixed - but so much time was wasted to assign blame, or that is what it felt like, and in the end the official reply was that the work done was of good quality and that nothing was wrong with the amp - I now know that yes.....if an amp sounds like that, something is definitely wrong we don't need to argue about it, and yes if your grounding scheme is done properly it is possible to have a close to silent valve amp......star grounding and the whole 'grounding' pdf on thevalvewizard's site is awesome in explaining all of it.