Wild Bill,
Thanks for your iput. I've got a crimping tool and terminals and think I'm skillful enough to wire in a new cord but could you expand on the "ground-reverse switch" and "death cap"? Sounds potentially painful. I hate pain.
Regards,
Most amps from the 2-wire era had a "ground reverse" switch. It was a single throw double pole switch that would toggle a bypass cap from either side of the power wires to ground. One position or the other would mean less hum pickup with the amp.
The reason it's nicknamed the "death cap" is that if the cap failed and shorted you had a 50% chance of the hot power wire shorted to the metal chassis/frame. If you were standing on something grounded like a wet basement floor you could get full line voltage through YOU!
This didn't happen often but man, could it hurt! If you had a heart problem who knows what could happen.
With a 3-wire cord that hard-grounds the chassis you don't have this worry. You also don't need a ground reverse switch anymore but if you leave it connected to your power wires you will still have the cap bypassing one wire or the other to ground. So you've put on the new cord but still have the death cap hazard!
So you disconnect the wires running to the switch, including the cap. Sometimes you might have to do a bit of new wire or splicing depending on how the amp was wired. If you take out the wires to the switch you might be breaking the power to the amp. The quick and easy way is to simply clip out the death cap. Then it doesn't matter if the switch is still there or not.
But as I had said, if you disconnect the ground reverse switch and re-wire the power properly you now have a perfectly good switch sitting in your amp that could be used for a neat mod...
:food-smiley-004: