Matchless Lightning - kinda

HamishR

Well-known member
A friend of mine who has owned two of my amps before asked me to build him something Voxy in a low wattage, with a master volume and a single 12" speaker combo. So I built this:

Lightning cab.JPG

It's based on a Matchless Lightning. I used a chassis and tagboard from Ceriatone, transformers from Mercury Magnetics and made the cab in my garage. Once I had built the amp I found it felt really unpleasantly tight to play, and comparing the filtering with a similar Vox AC15 I had built recently saw that the Matchless circuit had about ten times the amount of filtering! Well, more anyway. So I gradually reduced the filtering to where it still sounds exactly the same but feels much more fun to play.

One thing I'm particularly proud of is how quiet this amp is. I have been learning a lot about the art of grounding - yes, I am convinced it is an art! - and this amp is virtually silent when I roll the guitar volume down. If there is any hiss it's coming from whatever pedal is switched on!

While this isn't my favourite amp ever it does sound very good, especially with a good OD. It sounds especially good with a 335 or Casino - My Casino loves this amp.

Lightning chassisE.JPG

The amp's own breakup is nothing special - bit disappointing really. But it is loud enough to be a pedal platform and it does that extremely well. I put the Mercury badge on the faceplate to cover where it says "Ceriatone" as this is in no way a Ceriatone amp except for the chassis, faceplates and tagboard.

Lightning chassisI.JPG

I just need to clean up the board a bit and it's all done!
 
Aw shucks guys! Thanks!

The friend who I built it for found it a little bass-heavy for his style (he hits very hard!) so I have now switched out the bright switch for a "deep" switch. It now switches between two bypass caps on V1's cathodes to give him two levels of low-end. It's a lot more useful than a bright switch on this amp. It has also improved the break-up sound a fair bit too.
 
Looks fantastic! Great work. Also nice how such a simple tweak (the deep switch) can take it to the next level.

On the topic of grounding, have you read this: Bruno Putzeys: The G Word: How to get your audio off the ground. Bruno is famous for creating the NCore (hifi) amps, among other stuff. DIY friendly too. It’s been a while since I’ve read it myself.

I’m certainly no expert on the matter, but I’ve read enough to know that grounding is an important consideration in just about every circuit. When I designed my first PCB, and when other first time PCB designers post on diyAudio, the feedback is consistent and unanimous: always keep return currents in mind. (At DC and lower frequencies, on a PCB with a ground plane, return currents intuitively take the shortest and most direct route to ground. But when high frequencies are involved, maybe over 100khz iirc, return currents will increasingly follow the high frequency traces, even if it’s not the most direct path. Less relevant for analog audio and point to point wiring, but fascinating nonetheless!)
 
Beautiful work! It’s amazing how much difference such careful wire routing can make in an amp’s “hum” level. I also really like your remarks about too much filtering. In playback systems, it almost seems like you can’t have too much, as long as you watch capacitor impedances, etc., but as a “ performance” amp, I can definitely see the point where the amp is under its own control, rather than slightly looser, where the player gets more “feel” from it.
 
Looks beautiful inside and out :cool:

While this isn't my favourite amp ever it does sound very good, especially with a good OD
I have a Lightning (also built from Ceriatone parts) that is my main amp, and it is my favorite amp ever, at least until I get my DC-30.

If you don't mind my asking, how much did the Mercury iron set you back? I've heard it's a worthwhile upgrade.
 
For the Lightning the Mercury iron was particularly $$. I don't remember exactly but I think it was over $400 for the PT, OT and choke. It was all accounted for in the price I was paid but I recently built a Marshall style 18W and the PT and OT from GDS were about half that, and probably the same quality.

Thanks for the comments guys - It's good to hear! I do tend to work in my own little world and forget that there are other people out there playing their own stuff!
 
BTW by the time I had finished with the "deep" switch etc I quite liked this amp. I think it's worth trying another version and the main thing is that the fella who owns it loves it. I think that between this one and the Vox I built recently there is a great amp waiting to be built. I can see why you like the Lightning Mr Vigilante. It really loves P90 guitars. What are you playing through yours? I know Fender players seem to like them too.

DC30s are great amps too - until you need to move them. o_O
 
BTW by the time I had finished with the "deep" switch etc I quite liked this amp. I think it's worth trying another version and the main thing is that the fella who owns it loves it. I think that between this one and the Vox I built recently there is a great amp waiting to be built. I can see why you like the Lightning Mr Vigilante. It really loves P90 guitars. What are you playing through yours? I know Fender players seem to like them too.

DC30s are great amps too - until you need to move them. o_O
I'm a humbucker guy, my main guitar is basically a tele that thinks it's a Les Paul. I tend to run mine clean and get all my dirt from (tube) pedals, which it does very well for. I'll agree that the drive just from cranking the amp itself is nothing special.

Yeah I'm expecting the DC30 to weigh a bit. I'm building myself a DC15 into a 112 combo so I have a smaller version with (theoretically) the same tone for practicing and small gigs*.

*a hilarious joke as I don't play in a band
 
Amazing build! I agree that grounding is an art. That’s where electromagnetism laws really kick you in the butt, forget about discrete components!
 
A while ago I had the Ceriatone HC30 clone, their "Muchle$$ Dizzy 30" head. I loved the tone, but it was just too dang loud. So I sold it and got the Ceriatone "Creme Brulee", which is just the EF86 channel from the C30 and a 2xEL84 power section (so 15 watts instead of 30). As shipped, the master volume was almost unusable, one of those where there's no sound, then about 1mm of pot travel for useful volume, then the rest is essentially max volume. But I changed the volume control wiring a bit, now it's got a truly usable sweep. (And in hindsight, I probably could have fixed the "too loud" problem of the DZ 30, because it also suffered the too-touchy master volume problem. That amp had the actual Matchless transformers too!)

Which channel do you guys like on the C30? I was indifferent towards the 12ax7 channel, but that ef86 channel I thought was really something special. I've always wondered if there was some "mojo" in ef86 tubes, or if it's just the voicing of the amp. I found the ef86 really takes pedals well too, arguably better than my Hiwatt-style amps.
 
Which channel do you guys like on the C30? I was indifferent towards the 12ax7 channel, but that ef86 channel I thought was really something special. I've always wondered if there was some "mojo" in ef86 tubes, or if it's just the voicing of the amp. I found the ef86 really takes pedals well too, arguably better than my Hiwatt-style amps.
I like both for different reasons. In my 15W DC build I'm setting it up so I can combine the channels by internal jumpers. I want to be able to run EF86 channel into 12AX7 channel, 12AX7 channel into EF86 channel, or both channels in parallel. ALL THE CHOICES.

But having dealt with both types of tube in a variety of circuits, there really is something special about EF86. It has a unique character that you really can't replicate in 12AX7.
 
Back
Top