Home » VintageKustom.com » Comment Board » date my Kustom Frankestien Amp (Trying to figure out how old this thing is)
date my Kustom Frankestien Amp [message #21126] Mon, 11 August 2014 18:45 Go to next message
edekustom is currently offline  edekustom
Messages: 1
Registered: August 2014
Location: Chicago
Junior Member
I recently purchased this amp I know its a pretty early one it doesn't have the holder for the cables on the back and on the front it has Kustom By Ross
the model is L795RV 7 SN# 10728 I've already taken it it in to be repaired because the side with reverb & tremolo keeps farting out and I need a 28 volt bulb for it. I was hoping someone could help me figure out when this amp was made. I got the cab with one jenson was blown. It's a 3 x 15" 2 Jensen speakers and one huge horn. Thanks in advance for any help in this matter. Rock On!!!!
Re: date my Kustom Frankestien Amp [message #21128 is a reply to message #21126] Mon, 11 August 2014 22:07 Go to previous messageGo to next message
pleat is currently offline  pleat
Messages: 1452
Registered: June 2004
Location: Belding, Mi
Senior Member
The model number should be a Frankie amp with Reverb, Vibrato. The L795RV the L indicates Lansing Speakers, the 795 is the retail price for the head and a 2x15 speaker cabinet. Since your cabinet is a 3x15 and has a siren horn, at some point either a dealer sold the amp head and the 3x15 siren horn Jensen cab as a set or the amp and cabinet at some point found one another to make it a complete set.

The serial number is a high number and the chart would indicate it from January to June 1967 when it was replaced with the K200A series amp.

pleat
Re: date my Kustom Frankestien Amp [message #21132 is a reply to message #21126] Tue, 12 August 2014 07:16 Go to previous message
stevem is currently offline  stevem
Messages: 4728
Registered: June 2004
Location: NY
Senior Member
Hello and welcome to the place!
Since you have the amp in a repair techs hands now there are a few things that should get done with a amp this old.
The first thing would be to replace ALL the electrolytic type caps on all the circuit boards, two big main rail filters may be ok still.
The issue with these caps is that fact that the more the amp sits not fired up the sooner these type caps go south and even just one of these gone bad is your likely problem with the amp now.
The next thing your tech should just do is to replace all the resistors in the bias string that are located off of the output transistors on the rear of the amp as just a very small change in value of these resistors ( like .5 ohm) will drop some 20 to 40 watts of output from the amp as I found out with one of these amps I added to my heard last year!
Tell your tech to double that wattage of all of these resistors as these early Kustom amps have no output stage temperature diodes yet and as they get hot in use the output transistors bias which these resistors set will change and not for the better in regards to transistor life!
All of these parts should run you no more than 60 bucks at retail pricing, and if your tech has any questions have him or her as the case may be reach out to us here!

[Updated on: Tue, 12 August 2014 07:17]

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