ovation fuzz from the late 60's/// help me resurrect it?

[pinkjimiphoton]

hola mi amigos,

sooo in the 70's, i used to rock an ancient ovation preamp with top boost, fuzz, reverb and tremolo.

nostalgia dictated i find another, which i did. sadly, it arrived DOA yesterday, but the guy i got it from, one mr v from trading musician in seattle was a total gem and took care of me with it. i endorse this cat, good dude.

anyways, i took it apart last nite to try and sort it all out, and its kinda cool, modular like an old haynes jazz king II or your average tower computer... all circuits on their own cards, wired in parallel to the power supply, and all summed to a mixer stage <which is what has failied, but i plan on repairing>

these things sound GREAT into a clean fender. turn the amp volume down, crank the preamp, and bring up the volume till its loud n proud... add reverb trem, top boost and a touch of fuzz.... heavenly. when it works.

this one's sick. trying desperately to find a schematic for it with little success.

but anyways, i pulled the fuzz card, and was thinking it may be fun for us fuzzaholics <if there's any left out there> to play with.

my eyes are plain too damn bad these days to do much sadly. even with glasses and meds everything is fuzzy as hell.

so i figure i'd scan the suckers trace side and post it, and then write in the components and values. maybe even improve upon them some...
its a 2 x bc109 fuzz, so it should be something that COULD sound good.

as i recall, it was kinda chewey like a buzzaround, but 40 years later,  my ears may have gotten a bit more refined.

anyways, be back shortly with pics,. any help i'd be very grateful!

[ElectricDruid]

Well, I've never heard of it, so I'm interested to have a look at least! I'd love to see some pics.


Tom

[Marcos - Munky]

I'm interested too!

[pinkjimiphoton]

sorry brothers
not feeling so great today, had to go take a chill for a while.
gonna go down stairs to the dungeon and get some pics etc, will be back shortly. too cold to stay down there tonite!!

[digi2t]

Ovation K6001?

Popcorn is in the microwave.

[Rob Strand]

not feeling so great today, had to go take a chill for a while.

Take it easy.

Your description sounds a lot like this,
http://www.ovationtribute.com/Ovation%20Amps/Ovation%20K-6100%20Amp/Ovation%20K-6100.html
http://www.ovationtribute.com/Catalogues/Amplifiers%20Owner%20Manual/K-6001/K-6001.html
some others,
http://www.ovationtribute.com/Amplifiers%20Owner%20Manual.html

Unfortunately no schematics even for the amp.

Ovation K6001?

Just found that too.

[pinkjimiphoton]

damn dyslexic atheism strikes again ? beats me.

i took it apart. interesting way it was done, very clean and very easy to follow and work on,
even for a moroon like me.
got pix of some of it so gimme a sec here....

still waiting... lol

ok, first, the fuzz.

the top of the board. i have yet to write down the values, i hope to do so in the morning when i have good light to see. the leftmost trace is partially obscured, but if ya follow the line of my thumb it actually lines up. weird.




here's the trace side





here's the trace side reversed in case you're like me and like to draw the circuit onto the reversed trace to see what goes where. long story, but memory of a lobotomized circus flea here. so for me, it's easier to visualize





the transistors, at least the one i can see under the goop appear to be bc109 c's
orange drop is .33uF @75
other caps are chocolate colored blobs, all .001 @100v which is likely why the fuzz sounds so bloody @#$%ing atrocious.
outer foil of the first two facing the plug in area, marked by orange marks. <looking at top of board with them on bottom left> third .001 outer foil facing upwards.
the orientation matters, cuz if the outer foil isn't on the outside, you get a martian/mexican/alien/nsa radio reciever instead of a shield.
it's entirely possible they f'd this up. just presenting the facts, folks.

ANYWAYS...
here's the values i believe i see, but i don't see very well these days without really bright light.





the fuzz is supposed to work on both channels, so i am imagining its a stereo in with a mono out. its freekin weird. the amp will run with ANY of the cards pulled. seriously.

yet somehow, both channels run thru the fuzz.
i believe the outermost trace around the board is ground, i gotta take voltage measurements and stuff still. right now i'm just looking.

this, however is what's killed the damn thing, either the transistor, and unmarked button one, or some of its peripherals have died, messing up the preamp unless i'm mistaken.

the "channel two" only output works loud n proud.
the paralleled channel out put is about 12 db below unity with the thing pegged, which is NOT right, and appears to come right off those output jacks to the suspect transistor. this thing uses them same gawdawful spade connectors as the ludwig did, but at least are soldered on and heavily.














#fuzzygoodness





a couple random pics










the first two show where the preamp card mount was snapped off the front panel by the fedex monkeys, pointing at it with my pointy thing.

anyways.. i'm all in, its 1234 am here so i am outta here... let me know your thoughts! its entirely possible i've messed up some values, i cannot tell white and yellow or green and blue apart very well anymore unfortunately. 

check in tomorrow... peace!

[pinkjimiphoton]

this is a composite very badly done, but hopefully its right




duh. brain dead. i think i labeled the orange bands + on the earlier pic, but its actually gotta go to ground usually. sorry for the confusion!

[anotherjim]

Can't say anything to help, but I am being educated. I had no idea the Ovation brand existed before those boat-back acoustics spawned a generation of amplified whiners in the '70's

[digi2t]

JAM Industries, which is located about 20 minutes from my house, is the Canadian distributor and repair facility for many instrument manufacturers, including Ovation. I've sent them an email requesting any shop literature they may have. We'll see what pans out.

[pinkjimiphoton]

Can't say anything to help, but I am being educated. I had no idea the Ovation brand existed before those boat-back acoustics spawned a generation of amplified whiners in the '70's

lol oh, i dunno, i was always more of a les paul and marshall guy back then.

still like my reefer, too.

[pinkjimiphoton]

dino,
if you can find anything at all, you are even more godlyke than we thought.

i'm imagining SAMS photofact sheets somewhere festering in like, a 90 year old dude's repair shop maybe.
this thing i believe is from around 1968 or 69. series a it says on it, the serial number is kinda cryptic so just a guess as info is impossible to find.

i can see the colors clearer now with the sunlight streaming on it... i got one resistor wrong last nite, corrected below

[digi2t]

JAM Industries was a no go for "we don't share blablabla" reasons.

Contacting Ovation directly.

[pinkjimiphoton]

don't bother.
ovation was here in new hartford, ct.
when fender closed them a couple years back, they threw away all the shit from the entire ovation history. the factory had spare parts, pickups, amp parts etc. all gone. all paperwork gone, too.

dumbasses.

there's no one to contact, unless somehow ya can find one of the engineers who designed, but that was close to 50 years ago now, so odds aren't good, sadly.

my late brother ed had some stuff a friend had fished out of one of the dumpsters, got a whole "little dude" 100 watt guitar combo ... but it was in pieces. cabinet, speakers, amp, preamp, all taken apart and separate. resurrected it a few years ago.. but man, everything from there is gone, dino.

fender, who owns ovation now, has nothing.  frankly these days, i'd be amazed to get someone to answer the phone who isn't speaking dude speak.

gibson is THE WORST for crappy support these days. but fender isn't like it was, either.

i contacted a guy about SAMS photofacts, to see if he has anything from ovation, we'll see. a lot of times missing info can ONLY be found in those it appears... service techs would buy subscriptions to them, and they'd have all kindsa stuff in them for things you can't find elsewhere.

its possible i think to fix this, just by tracing it. but man, a schematic would indeed be awesome!!!

question for you smarter guys...

if ya put two circuits in parallel with each other, will you lose half the output? perhaps this thing DOES work and i'm just forgetful...

but messing with it, once in a while i could get the "quiet" outputs to unleash one hell of a roar which is more what i expected from my memories. just a split second here or there.. so assuming either the mixer board is damaged, or something is shorted from getting banged in transport. gonna take quite a bit of looking i have a feeling. but the GOOD thing is both preamp boards and all the module boards all appear to be working. so its either wires, connectors, or that one board.

the fuzz will be cool to mess with hopefully. looking at it, it looks like they f'd up and put the wrong value caps in... 10n maybe, but 1n? no way. i bet they were supposed to be 10n or 100n.

and of course, i think if the fuzz can be improved upon, well... thats just icing on the cake!!

[Mark Hammer]

The fuzz is a two-transistor circuit, going by the pic.  Just how different could the topography be from the various 2-transistor fuzzes we are all familiar with?  It's either gonna be something like a Fuzz Face, something like a Fuzz-Rite, or something like a Boss-Tone right?

[pinkjimiphoton]

probably, mark

but hard to tell cuzza the miles of cable connecting stuff, i am gonna have to trace where each of the inputs at the bottom of the board go to in the unit i think.

it MAY be two ONE transistor fuzzes summed to mono... each channel shares the fuzz as far as i remember, and it looks like it has two independent inputs to me, that then get summed and output thru the sprague cap.

it doesn't sound like a fuzzface, or a bosstone or a fuzzrite. more like a severely distorted treble booster kinda.  reminds me almost of the distortion in a jc120. sounds ok in moderation when the amp is cranked, sounds like poopy death by itself with the things volume turned low.

misbiased 2 transistor 60's fuzz, absolutely.

[Marcos - Munky]

I did a quick and dirty drawing on DIYLC:


And here's what I got:

The numbers are the tracks from left to right, and my guesses on what they are.

[digi2t]

Ovation replied promptly. No info available.

[pinkjimiphoton]

dino,
let me put it this way... bob widlar woulda tore ovation a new one over this

munky, looks cool!! i am gonna check it out. hope to breadboard maybe this weekend,
and will try and get the fuzz level pot value and voltage it runs on then as well. the two open pads are i believe for the fuzz softness control mentioned in some of the other models.

wow, interesting permutation! i gotta look closer. i CAN tell ya that its all color codeds, so we should be able to figure it out once i get a chance to get to it. your interpretation is likely right, yet almost opposite of mine. but i will defer to your experience and ...

where's that popcorn, dino?

[pinkjimiphoton]

hmmm... maybe the parents, kaman aerospace may have archives?