1958 Heathkit Guitar Amp & Cab

1958 Heathkit Custom Guitar Amp and Cab

This is a one-off custom built 35 watt guitar head with matching cab. A previous client had inherited a non-working mono Heathkit AA-131 pre-amp and AA-81 power amp that his father had built in the late 50's. He wanted to keep the amp in the family, but didn't want to use it as a hi-fi system as it was mono. An avid vintage guitar and amp collector he asked if it could be converted to a guitar amp. The pre-amp and amp were restored to working condition by replacing the bad electrolytic capacitors and drifted resistors as well as replacing the preamp tubes with Tungsols and the EL-84 output tubes with ones with hotter specs. The preamp had a single tone control knob and was replaced with high, mid and low controls using a classic Fender tone stack. A custom cab to house them was designed and built, covered with tweed and black tolex. The result was so well recieved that the client asked to have an existing speaker cab re-covered with the same tolex 2-tone combination to match. It now is a great sounding, truly unique one-of-a-kind amp that gets a lot of comments from those that see and hear it. The selector controls still work and the pre-amp can still operate as a amp for an mp3 player, phono, or reciever.