The Wreck Styles

The name Ken Fischer is well known in the amp world.

He started working for Ampeg building amps for them near his New Jersey home then migrated to opening his own shop. The Trainwreck amps he designed and built in his home shop are the stuff of legends. One amp that goes from clean to soaring overdrive and sustain with the use of your volume knob. Few builders have the cult following that Ken does. His untimely death was a sad day. He freely shared so much of his information and knowledge.

Prior to his death he began working with a company to produce an amp he designed. The Komet amp is that result and you can buy one today- for a very high price. That's not to say any of Ken's amps are inexpensve. If you can find one, they are well into 5 figures. Each amp he built was given a woman's name.

He built several models. The Liverpool was a version using 4 EL84 power tubes for about 36 watts of power. The Express is an EL34 tubed amp running close to 50 watts. The Rocket was closer to a Vox sound and it also used 4 el84 tubes. I have built the Express and the Liverpool. I have also built a variation from the AX84 website that mates a Trainwreck preamp section to a 2-3 watt power section. Unique and great if your ears or neighbors can't take the sonic fury the bigger wattage amps dish out.

The classic Trainwreck cabinet in Cherry. Fingerjointed and with a reproduction faceplate of cherry as well. This is a Liverpool I currently have for sale. Its not cheap as I had to pay for the cabinet that was custom made for me. This amp currently has a device called a VVR (Variable Voltage) master control circuit installed. Ken never used a master volume in his amps- frankly he did not have my neighbors or spousal unit yelling at him to turn it down either. So I installed this circuit that lowers the voltage going to the power circuit and its very effective a getting a nice overdrive the amps are noted for at less than peace distroying volumes.

Turn it all the way up and its effectively out of the circuit and the amp is stock.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Looking into the chassis from the rear, you can see the 4 EL84 power tubes and 3 preamp tubes. This amp has power and output transformers sold by Tonesluts (love that name) and they are custom wound replicas of the Heyboer units Ken sourced for his amps. They give a lot of punch and Ken used a special output configuration for his output transformer. Not cheap but component choice is a major part of getting these amps to sound right.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I hand made the turret board, filter capacitor and power resistor boards for this amp. Its laid out very carefully to avoid noise and interaction of different parts of the circuit. The green PCB board is a VVR control board for teh Master volume circuit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the power supply and power tube cathode resistor board. You can see the power supply diodes on the center right side and the huge power supply and cathode resistors I used on this amp. I tend to overbuild.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Closeup of the preamp section. Ken's circuit used a surprisingly little amount of components to get his trademark sound. Wiring runs here are carefully laid out so no noise is created. A little noise at the front end becomes a big problem once its amplified by the power section.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This amp is a 2-3 watt Wreck style I built from the AX84 website schematic. It sings like its big brother at a much more friendly volume. It can't match to deep bass and sonic fury of a full wattage Trainwreck but it is surprisingly loud for such a small output. Tube watts are just loud watts. I built this in a Hammond Steel chassis and bottom plate with a matching cage cover. Its for sale for $550.

The amp uses 3 preamp tubes and a 6SN7 Octal tube for power. Its a tube that is like two tubes in one.

The chassis is 16 X 8 and the cover makes it about 8" tall.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Looking at the back you can see this amp actually uses fixed bias to control power tube bias. So I installed external bias points to facilitate this. It is capable of 4/8/16 ohm output as well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just because the wattage is small does not mean its a simple amp inside. It has much the same layout as the big brothers with a few changes. On the Power supply/Bias board to the right you can see two black and white round internal pots. These are for setting the bias of each side of the 6SN7 power tube used in the power section of this amp. One tube has two power generating elements and it treated like two separate tubes. A very cool design and it works great. These tubes are plentiful.