V8
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.....
