1962 Gibson GA5 Skylark 5w Tube Amp

I bought this Skylark off of the son-in-law and daughter of the original owner. Its transformers and speaker date it to 1962 and it's entirely original except for the 3-prong cord (with generous length) that I added and a replacement knob for the volume. It was a bit grungy when it arrived but cleaned-up beautifully. I'm very much not used to seeing amps from this era clean up this well, to be honest.

Its advantages? It's "tweed Champ" in character, lightweight at about 11 lbs, smallish, has a pine cabinet, and looks great. After swapping-in the 3-prong cable, I fired it up and played it for a while and let it "cook in" for 4 or 5 hours while I was doing tidying-up around the shop. All of its original components are doing just fine and there was no need to replace anything on the board.

I (criminally) Sharpied the tube types on the back of the chassis for the next guy swapping tubes, but the original ones are all good. During cleaning some lost their labels but they are all Raytheon tubes except for a single RCA (the 6EU7). When I installed the 3-prong cable I clipped the "death cap," of course, but did leave it inside but disconnected -- only hooked to the ground side. I figured someone down the line might want to see it.

Tonewise, fat and loud pickups will drive this into bluesy or garage-rock distortion nicely when it's cranked but right up until about 6 or 7 with most pickups you will have a clean sound. The original speaker is in good order but I did find that it "farted out" a little on low notes while using guitars with big, wide-sounding pickups with a lot of low end so I (carefully) stuffed a little bit of foam dampening material under each "leg" of the speaker housing to just lightly-damp the very lip of the cone and bring the low-end under control. It worked like a charm, sounds great and more consistent, now, and is easily-reversible. 

As far as wear and tear -- the tolex does have a little bit of dust/built-in grunge around the handle area (not obvious) and, of course, the plastic Gibson logo is damaged on the grill.