The Story Most great ideas have very small beginnings, and Li’l Dawg Amps is one of those ideas. What began as a dream to give my son Michael a one-of-a-kind handmade birthday present, rapidly took on a life of it’s own once I started on the project.

I decided I wanted to make a small tube guitar amp for him, as we’re both guitar players. It seemed like an easy project, just a little work here and there and out it would come ready to play. I was definitely in for a surprise. There is a great deal of planning and labor that goes into making an amplifier that not only sounds right, but looks right also. I spent a lot of time looking at and listening to different amps, just to narrow the choice down to the one I wanted for my son. It had to be just right.

The amp that I thought sounded the best for the styles we play happened to be the time proven ‘59 Fender 5F1Champ. A sweet little workhorse that’s full of tone, and able to do anything from country, to rhythm & blues, to rock, and especially well suited for blues. These are also nicely suited for harp too, with just the right amount of grind. What was so amazing was all the tone that was available and no need for a tone control, just a single knob for volume. The tube compliment is a 12AX7, a 6V6GT, and a 5Y3GT.

So now I had the amp, but the Champ’s only had a 8” speaker in a very small cabinet. They were great with a mic in front of them, but on their own they didn’t have much volume. So I tried different cabinet designs out and finally ended up with a cabinet large enough for a 12” speaker, slightly deeper than most, and with a ¾ back for some punch. I use 1”solid pine for the cabinet and 3/8” Baltic birch plywood for the sound board and back panels, dovetail the joints for strength, cover them with good quality tweed obtained from a restoration shop, then give them a four coats of polyurethane (1 coat of 50/50 honey pine & 3 coats of clear). Add a quality leather handle, stainless steel hardware, and the cabinets closely resemble a wide panel tweed amp of the late 50’s plus they sound great. The amps are currently available in single 12” combos, with 8”, 10” and 15”combos available upon request. Jensen speakers are my choice for these amps. I can also make matching speaker cabinets for any of my amps.

I buy all the materials and hand-build each amp from scratch. I drill and punch all of the chassis holes, fabricate my circuit boards by hand, and solder all of the components and wiring in point-to-point fashion. I’ve taken a bit of liberty with the capacitors and tweaked the tone just a bit, but the rest of the circuit is true to the original. I also install an extra speaker jack for adding a cabinet to the amp. Champs had a 4ohm output transformer, which I still use, but I load the cabinet with a single 8ohm speaker so the option is there to add another 8ohm cabinet of your choice. At 8ohms, the amps put out about 4-5 watts for a nice vintage tone. Plug a 4ohm load into it and it gets to be a very surprisingly loud 8 watts. Pushing a 4ohm load they’re loud enough for most venues of 100 or so people without a need for a mic, and yes they can compete with a drummer. The tone is very close to the late 50’s Tweed amps that are prized by their owners. The average weight of the amps run from 21 to 25 lbs. depending on the speaker, so they are definitely easy to move from gig to gig.

So now the amp was together, all except for the name. I thought of my son’s dog Whiskers, who is a Chihuahua mix, and Li’l Dawg was the name that came to mind. He’s the one you see pictured on all of the amp labels. Then I needed a model name and “Champster” was the favorite . I have plans in the future of adding some other amps and matching cabinets, but for the present I’m having fun building the “Champster”s and watching people play them for the first time.

"Make a joyful noise unto the Lord….Psalm 100"