The Steel Guitar Forum

If someone (me) were to order enough parts to make a quantity of old style Deluxe Reverbs using plywood cabinets, JJ tubes, Mojo transormers and WeberVST speakers, do you believe there's a market for them at around $1600+ a piece?

Raybob, you're in the wrong place, seriously.

You should spend a lot of time on the Fender Forum, Telecaster Forum (the DR is considered one of the all-time great Tele amps), the WeberVST amp forum and especially the alt-guitar.amps newsgroup.

Because you have a TON of competition.

There are dozens of professional and semi-professional(and by that I mean only that it's not a full-time business and they're usually amp techs as well) boutique amp builders, and very popular brands of hand-wired knock-offs or modified versions of Deluxe, Champ, Princeton, every tweed imaginable, Vox, Marshall or uniquely designed amps. Fender even makes their OWN hand-wired series of Custom-Shop amps (like the '64 Vibroverb custom - hand wired, solid-wood cabinet, BF circuitry with a few Cesar Diaz SRV mods) as does Marshall.

To pull it off you need consistency and something other than eBay for marketing...you'll NEVER sell $1600 Deluxe Reverb clones (you can't use the Fender logos OR names, BTW - even in your description) on eBay. Stuff like that goes for under a grand, and you can't afford to build good ones for that price. To sell them for more, you need advertising, distribution, sales - and NAMM.

If you want to do it - do it for fun, as 90% of the new builders that appear each year are gone within 3-5 years.

Thanks Jim. I suppose it's a passion of mine to do this so I began production. I've been learning much from the forums you mentioned and other places. I started with ordering kits from Weber but by the third amp, I decided to go with better quality pots, jacks, tubes, etc., just so I'll feel confident about guaranteeing these things.

I've seen DR clones from others for a little over a grand. I'll be asking 1300 on eBay "Buy it now" for these but I'm using better speakers, better mods, adding tilt-back legs, to make one that should stand above the competition in that price range.

I have pictures of them at www.tube-tone.com.