Stigger, congratulations! wise choice if you ask me. have fun when it arrives, and do let us know!

WR

Rules to live by #314:
"When in Italy, if the menu says something's grilled, don't assume it is."

https://www.facebook.com/The-Malbehavers-286429584796173/

At'ta boy, Stigger!!!! You won't be sorry.

Bob S.

Bob

man, the day it arrives, you'll want to call in sick to the job and just stay home for hours....

Welcome to the dark side.

The Thunderchiefs

Man, I am jonesing for this thing to come!

^^ musicans friend does have a great return policy, you can basically buy it and if you hate it, return it.

MikeG
Seriously though, I had heard of inconsistencies in the reissue units, but now I'm starting to realize that I really need to HEAR the unit before I plunk down my dough, which is gonna pretty much rule out the eBay experience, unfortunately.

Depends, Mike...

as far as inconsistency goes, from what I got from all the research I did before buying the Weber tanks and a few years ago my cosmoverb, that goes for vintage as well as RI tanks.

yes there is a chance that one's not happy with the unit as it comes, whichever one chooses to buy. 30 bucks or so will at least change the tubes if necessary.
a second free fix is to check whether the tray is floatng or screwed down: lots of people screw it down to get rid of the drip - not all tank users are surf-guitarists.

but the real problem, as far as internet stories can tell, is in the trays themselves. the common belief (don't know whther this is true) is that the quality of accutronics trays seems to become more inconsistent, and ngoing down on average. don 't know whether it'strue.
Eitherway, the manufactoring proces renders them incosistent in quality anyway, plus that they seem to sound better with age, according to "the fender forum people"

So, the tray itself might not sound as good as one hopes. BUT.... and here's the problem ... what sounds good is relative - I 've seen people describe "bad" tanks on the fender forum all the time as "too drippy, too sproingy, too metalic" etc .... not for blooz, yes for surf, in other words.

The vintage trays I saw on ebay (hammond and gibbs, before they were branded accutronics) typically fetch three times as much or more as what a new accutronics tray will cost.

and I don 't know how the situation is in the US - in the netherlands where I live, in 5 years of visiting guitar stores, both GC like and the cool little vintage stores, all over the netherlands, belgium and france, if actally seen a fender reverb unit 'live' on sale TWICE. checking different ones out is not really an option here.

that said, I'm just reposting info here I gathered before making the choices I made. might well all be modern day urban myth.

I the meantime, owning two tanks, I got two extra reverb trays of ebay, both from the nineties both for arouund $20 bucks. just in case.... the tray in my cosmoverb must be from 2001 or 2002, the one I got wih the Weber kit is very new, it's got the 'crhomelike' case, not the older 'goldlike' case. Neither of these trays sound bad, imo, the very new one sounds a bit less than the other, but still good. can't hear a real difference in the other ones, and they are all fine be me.

In my opinion, getting a tank from ebay is well worth the risk, unless you have acces to plenty tanks to try before you buy, and they are not that much more. you have a real good chance of getting a great tank, and a real chance you get a tank that might improve from easy fixes. the tube swap is a taste thing too, not something 'definetly needed' to make it sound like a true surf tank, imho.

and, eitherway, again, what we're discussing here is one tank to another tank, which is still a couple of leagues above onboard reverb or a pedal.

my two cents.

btw, one last thing, getting the weber kit instead of a fender unit was a budget thing more than anything else - that it's ptp is a nice bonus about which I'm happy , but I'd have taken the fender RI if it would have been the same price.

just to scare you, here's the webprices of some Fender stuff - expect to pay 30-40 % more when you buy in a shop.

Fender Reverb Unit ... $755
MIJ Jag ..... $830
USA '62 Jag ....$2150

• sigh -
  WR

Rules to live by #314:
"When in Italy, if the menu says something's grilled, don't assume it is."

https://www.facebook.com/The-Malbehavers-286429584796173/

BillAqua

sidewalksurf

MikeG
Yeah, I'm gonna have to bite the bullet and get a tank one of these days.
I played through a borrowed one (reissue) last Saturday night when we played up in Portland and it was pretty cool, although I noticed I had to crank the tone up quite a bit higher to get it to drip than the vintage one I borrowed from Pete Weinberger a few years back (don't know the year, but brown "rough" tolex and oxblood grille). Is that characteristic of the reissue units?

My reissue is the opposite. It "drips" at lower settings than my '64...

Someone put an extra tone capacitor on my '64 and it took away a lot of the drip. I recorded our whole album with the tank set at 9 9 9 and it sounds like I'm at about 6 6 6 on a working tank. The capacitor was of vintage so it looked like it belonged to the naked uneducated eye. Now I ain't saying you're not educated Mike. But have you looked it over real good?

When I got it wired properly last summer, it was like getting a new tank all over again.

Hmmm. I'll have to dig around in there and check it out. It doesn't sound bad by any means, but yeah, I have almost always run it wide open. I've been using the reissue lately for gigs - my '64 has taken a lot of punishment and had a lot of beer spilled on 'er over the years so I figure I'll save her recording purposes and "special" gigs.