Adventures in Tubeland

Gotta love a good mystery. Nothing is worse than a poorly written one. You know, the kind that gives the plot away in the first few pages and stumbles on to the conclusion where it is finally put out of its misery. My 3rd daughter and I have a running joke about English mysteries (which I seem to have a knack for grabbing at the library).
Well, I love a good mystery in the amp realm too. Don't get me wrong, I want to right every wrong I possibly can when working on an amp. But a mystery now and then can serve to put me on notice that I do not know everything about everything.
I have a Kalamazoo One that I picked up on the Bay for a project. The owner said it had died on night at a gig and he had no idea why but was giving up on it.
The amp looked positively burned when it arrived and smelled burned too. The 6x4 rectifier had two diodes soldered to it and the tubes would not light up even though they tested good. I put that amp up on the bench and down on the floor several times over several weeks. Each time I looked at it, I had to admit I had no clue what was going on. Now this admission frustrated and wounded me. The frustration drove me to seek a greater understanding. I did not want this amp to end up in my garage as a "project that I never got around to". There are plenty of those available on Craigslist. But in order to get from "here" to "there", I had to swallow my pride and admit this one had me stumped.
On the internet you run the gamut of teaching styles. Some of the advice is positively pathetic. Some of it sparkles like precious gems. It is up to you to sift out the diamonds from the dirt. If humbling myself to seek understanding is the first step, then separating the useful from the not-so-useful is the second.
The final result is that the amp got fixed. This is for those of you who feel that I am beginning to ramble like a few of those English novelists I despise. But, I learned something even more valuable about myself. Admitting I needed help might wound my pride but would not kill me. And becoming a student was not an altogether unpleasant experience. Most of all, running into a mystery I could not immediately solve did not destroy my love for tube amps but deepened my respect for the technology. It is a sad contradiction about human experience that we seek to simplify and demystify in order to feel in control of our lives and when we are done we are immensely unsatisfied with our mechanistic, materialistic world.
The amp got a new filament transformer and now happily churns out sound. The wife got to roll her eyes and pull the door to my music room tightly closed. And I got to regain my sense of awe at the vast storehouse of knowledge that I have yet to encounter.