On Jun 3, 8:15*pm, "Arfa Daily" wrote:
A Fender Supersonic combo landed on my bench as an urgent job today. Ticket
said "Power, but no output". The pilot light on the front panel lit up, but
that was about it. There was no sign of the output tubes being alight at
all. When I had removed the chassis from the cabinet, it was clear that
every filament in the whole amp was wired by a single parallel run, and that
this was common with the supply to the pilot light. There is a 10 amp
filament fuse in the line, that looks as though it might be after the pilot
light take off point, but the fuse was intact. You couldn't immediately see
the undersides of the first few preamp tubes on that wiring run, due to
there being a back panel PCB above them, which carried the effects send and
return jacks and a couple of pots etc. However, you could get to the bottoms
of the output tubes, and there was no voltage at the filament pins of
either.

I removed the PCB that was in the way, and it was then apparent what was
wrong. The hand soldering of just about all the tube socket wires, and
especially the thicker and doubled-up filament wires, was astoundingly poor
for a Fender branded product. The solder had not properly taken to any of
the filament pin tags on the tube bases, and the mechanical appearance of
each joint was appalling. The amp was definitely built using lead-free
solder, but it looked as though nobody had told the hand assembly part of
the production line, and they were trying to make the joints with soldering
irons with their tip temperature set to produce correct joints with lower
melting point leaded solder ...

A reflow of the offending joints with some new solder fed in, restored the
filament supply to the output tubes and those that followed after them, and
the amp then worked just fine.

Other than the normal references to Fender being in California USA, I could
find no indication of where this amp had actually been built. These amps are
not cheap, and I would normally associate the name Fender with a quality
product. In this case, however, I felt very disappointed for the owner. In
order for poor workmanship like this to find its way out of the factory
door, either the QA is non-existent or poorly structured, or else the QA
manager needs his arse firing out of the job ...

Arfa

Did all the rest of the solder joints in the amp look ok?