Grateful Dead Music Forum

Hi,

I have an old Crate Vintage club 30 watt amp and I am pretty sure I have a bad volume pot on the clean channel. The volume will suddenly cut out and it is super scratchy when I turn the volume knob. I tried some of that electronics cleaner spray and worked the knob for a while and that didn't help. I also swapped the tubes around form the known good channel to the channel with the issue just to bu sure it was not a tube issue.

I am thinking it needs a new volume pot. Anyone ever replaced a amp volume pot before? I really want to avoid sinking much money into this thing. I bought a Savage macht 6 and the tone is so sweet! The crate is a good amp but I have my eye on a Savage Rhor 30 and would love to be able to fix -> sell the crate and go class a.

Thanks!

Ok, I'll jump in.

There's an amazing amount of info about these amps online - it appears you might "only" need to re-flow the solder joints for the pot. But if that doesn't work:

This amp has the pots attached to the main PCB, so it will be a bit of a PITA to pull one off (or re-flow the solder joints). Not hard, but it will require some patience since you'll have to open her up, discharge the caps, take all the knobs off, the nuts holding on the jacks, the screws holding the PCB to the chassis, identify the pot, find a replacement, pull the old one, solder in the new one...

Not really hard, per se, but tedious if you're not into that sort of thing.