LabSeries L7 410
Incomes this big beast of an amplifier. Brought in by a local guy. In quite a poor state of repair (amplifier, that is not the owner?)
Reported lots of different faults, ranging from totally dead to reverb not working. The owner seemed to be more concerned with the handle not being present. That should have set alarms bells ringing I guess.
These are nice amplifiers, so well worth trying to resurrect. I noticed all the loudspeaker wiring had been removed. The cabinet has 4 x 10” loudspeakers wired in series parallel configuration. With the chassis removed, we went about checking it over. There had been many repairs in the past. Replaced output transistors and various bits tagged about. These amplifiers are not the easiest of things to work on, but after a couple of hours work, the main chassis was working well.
I turned to the reverb tank in the bottom of the cabinet. As usual, screwed to the cabinet in a Rexine case. I struggled getting this away from the cabinet. I then realized (the smell should have alerted me), the whole thing was covered in cats feces and urine. With surgical gloves on, I disinfected the whole area and repaired all the wiring which had been eaten away by the urine. The thin cables to the send and received coils of the reverb tank had to be remade. After a few hours of drying in the sun, all was back together and the amplifier working as it should. I was concerned that the loudspeaker cones may have been damaged by the cats spraying urine. However, all was ok. The amplifier founded great.
When I told the owner of what had been found and the work carried out, all I received was a comment “oh I have cats”.
I ask myself why do I bother with this sort of thing??????
