Ceriatone 18/36 TMB EF68

Junkmale · Post by **Junkmale** » Tue 03/03/09 1:59 am

G'day all,
I'm a newbie with a newbie type question. I play in a Classic Rock band (www.junkmale.com.au) and have had enough of playing through a Boss GT8 and a marshall JCM2000.......boring, too many knobs, no class. Anyway, I'm looking seriously at getting the Ceriatone 18/36 TMB EF68 and going back to basics with probably just an overdrive pedal up front for leads.
The clips on Youtube are not very good and the setups are not well explained, so I guess I'm just gauging what the general opinion is of these amps for this sort of music.
As you probably have guessed, I'm new to the 18/36w thing (although I'm old enough to know better) but I've not read a bad report on these amps.
Thanks in advance for any thoughts.
P.S Great website, great posts.
Cheers
Greg

Post by **zaphod_phil** » Tue 03/03/09 2:17 pm

I don't have direct personal experience of Ceriatone's EF86 variant of the 18W/36W TMB design. I can therefore just say that in general the 18W/36W TMBs are really excellent amps for classic rock playing. I know some of our members have bought Ceriatone's EF86 version and AFAIK have been very pleased. There have also been some comments about bass being a bit too much IIRC, but this small problem got successfully tweaked out in each case with the help of other 18watt.com members.

Post by **jaysg** » Tue 03/03/09 4:58 pm

I've heard good things about the Ceriatone 18/36 kits. One thing that might offer an improvement would be if you got your OT from Simcha Delft who is either in Oz or NZ...I forget which. I don't think the Ceriatone OTs are the absolute best. The PTs should be fine. I know that some of the builders get GDS iron from Graydon, which means he knows import hoops.

Brewmaster · Post by **Brewmaster** » Tue 03/03/09 6:07 pm

I have worked on a couple of 36/18 Ceriatones. One had a Plexi clone OT from Promethius and the other had a Trainwreck OT, identical to what is available from Mojo. I preferred the Trainwreck. Anyway, after a few tweaks they sounded pretty damn good to me. So much so I built one based on the Ceriatone layout. I made a bunch of changes and the amp is now right where I want it.

I just use a clean boost, a Catalinbread for leads.

Junkmale · Post by **Junkmale** » Wed 03/04/09 1:09 am

Thanks everyone for your replies. I've been slowly reading back through the posts and picking up bits of information as I go.
I reckon I'll go the way of the Ceriatone and have a go at putting it together myself, afterall, how hard can it be......fold along line A, join at point C, hit with hammer at point G.....plug into wall...hey presto!
Thanks again, I'll let you know how I go. Cheers

Revv23 · Post by **Revv23** » Fri 03/13/09 8:00 am

Haha good luck.

Yeah when the layout's good it's like putting together a high voltage lego set (with a soldering iron lol)

However it's harder to troubleshoot and tweak if you don't understand the design. I guess that's what 18watt is for though. Lol

Welcome to the addiction!

Post by **zaphod_phil** » Fri 03/13/09 9:50 am

Just go easy with that hammer at point G - you don't want to break your tubes!

Junkmale · Post by **Junkmale** » Sat 03/14/09 11:42 pm

zaphod_phil wrote:Just go easy with that hammer at point G - you don't want to break your tubes!

Na, I'm not that silly. I was gonna use a rubber mallet

It should be here this week. Just gotta decide on a cab now. At the moment I have a 2x12 marshall cab with 1 x 80W Vintage and 1 x 80W heritage but I don't think they will give me the tone I'm looking for. Will probably try to source some G12H-30's or similar.

P.S Excuse my noobie typo in my first post - "EF68" - what a wombat.

mark0614 · Post by **mark0614** » Fri 03/27/09 3:49 am

Some advice for a newbie, dry joints are your enemy and can cause you a world of stress.

Get your soldering together and be patience. Keep working on it till it is perfect!

Junkmale · Post by **Junkmale** » Fri 03/27/09 3:57 am

mark0614 wrote:Some advice for a newbie, dry joints are your enemy and can cause you a world of stress.

Get your soldering together and be patience. Keep working on it till it is perfect!

Solder??? Suppose I'd better put the welder away then

You're dead right Mark, I'll work at it because it's not something I've done a lot of. Thanks for the heads up.

John_A · Post by **John_A** » Fri 03/27/09 3:21 pm

For your first amp, the price ceriatone charge to put it together you may as well let them, and they do a fantastic job too! I know that goes against the grain for an amp building forum, but that's what I did and while I was enjoying playing the Ceriatone I put together a Lite IIB!

A lite IIB is a much simpler build to get you started, and I'm actually uing mine as my main amp now, sounds fantastic and the lack of bells & whistles I think is actually a good thing. Do it all from the guitar clean, through crunch, all the way to dirty and all of them sound great! Also the 18W is a lot louder than you would imagine.

IMO the Ceriatone OT's sound great so if you go for a kit I'd have no hesitation in recommending them. If you look through some old posts there was a TMB shootout and the ceriatone kit was the one that came out top, and that was with stock a OT.

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Ceriatone 18/36 TMB EF68

Ceriatone 18/36 TMB EF68