Davoli DTE 1052S A15 - 10W ECL86 amp with tremolo  [schematic]

Tube or solid-state, this section goes to eleven!
Post Reply
User avatar
modman
a d m i n
Information
Posts: 4888
Joined: 19 Jun 2007, 16:57
Has thanked: 4392 times
Been thanked: 2130 times

Post by modman »

Is very much like the little pink amp a restored a few years back. That one was sold off, I just had too many amps around the house, and too little time to play them all. Little Pinkie was very wanted, just because of the color. But it also meant that I had to spend about 275 euro to wrestle it from the hands of some Flemish hipster soccer milf. It needed new tubes, a whole bunch of rewiring, filter caps and a new speaker. Then the guy who bought it haggle down to 350 euro, though I wanted 375. This is just philantropy...

Anyway, had most of my amp stuff packed up, but couldn't pass on a 35 euro deal for another Davoli... just the chassis, which is basically the faceplate of the amp. No cabinet or speaker included. Originally, it looked like this:
Davoli A15 01.jpeg
Davoli A15 02.jpeg
Googling this model will take you to:
https://www.hendrixguitars.com/Va091.htm (scroll down, schematic partially visible and very low resolution)
http://www.gitaarnet.nl/forum/showthrea ... al)-schema (all dead links and not https - how most forums end up)

So I contacted the nice fellow at amps-unlimited.nl and he sent me this corrected schematic (mistakes in the bridge rectifier connections):

DTE1052.jpg
When I got the amp, the power transformer was completely loose and a number of connection were broken. When trying to restore them, the voltage selector disintegrated. So I rewired in a fuse directly to the 220V connection on the primary. However, the unit contained a 100uF + 20uF of Italian make, which I can only believe to be original, even though the schematic has two 100uF caps... There was also a 32uF/400V with its positive side connected to the ground plane and the negative pole unconnected...

It was like a sudoku puzzle to figure out what loose leads went where... maybe that's the only reason I still like this stuff...
IMG_2052.jpg
IMG_2006.jpg
IMG_2007.jpg
I'm not done with this thing yet, but thought I'd share the schematic. The pink amp was a real revelation to me mostly because of the nice economical triode+pentode design. Using two of these in pushpull gives you the nice 10W amp your bedroom needs. If I build another amp from scratch, it will be based on this or the pink schematic, but using a proper solid cabinet. No matter how snazzy these amps look - I am still convinced the cabinets were built for radios or televisions.

However, all tubes seem to have risen in price... I was able to score a batch of 11 for 90 euros. It was either that or spend 40 euros on a set...
I'll update this blog post thing as I go along...
Please, support freestompboxes.org on Patreon for just 1 pcb per year! Or donate directly through PayPal

Post Reply