Amp jack

RideTheCrash

RideTheCrash

Member
My brother has a little Fender Frontman bass amp that he's had for a few years. The design for the input jack was originally soldered onto the PCB and it broke off (poor design) and it was re-wired with a separate wire to the PCB to fix that problem. The nut that held the jack in place was plastic and it broke a while back. I'm going to pop over to the store and pick up a new jack but I think I asked about it a few months ago at the store and the guy seemed to think there was certain kinds of jacks depending on the amp or something.

I just need a standard 1/4" input jack though right? Similiar to one used in a guitar? That's what I'm thinking, but I just want to double check.
 
Should be. But check to make sure. Some input jacks have a tab that shorts out the pos. to ground when nothing is plugged in. This cuts down on hum.
 
I had to replace the input jack on a solid state fender Deluxe 85 years ago and it took a special jack that had way more pins than the standard switchcraft type.
I recall I had to special order it, maybe from Fender. I sure didn't want to chance frying the preamp board!
 
Fender amps are a pain to work on due to everything (jacks and controls) being soldered to a single board, and they don't leave you much room between parts for modifications. Parts which are not "genuine Fender part(s)" often will not fit in the space allowed. If you have enough room there is no reason why a standard input (mono phone) jack will not work. Make sure there is enough room for the replacement jack before you start soldering.
 
There should be enough room, I've tightened the jack up in the past a million times and I think it was already replaced with a cheap plastic one when my father in law re-wired it. I'll check, but I'm pretty sure it's standard.
 
I opened it back up and after peeling off layers of electrical tape, it's a black plastic jack and the cable end stays inside of it when plugged in. It has 3 tabs on each side. One side has nothing on it, and the other side has two wires. The one wire appears to be wrapped around two of the tabs, and the other wire, just one. Do you guys still think a standard jack would work the same?

Doesn't look like this: http://www.miniemma.btinternet.co.uk/FenderJacks1.jpg
 
Good luck with the repair. I really hate to work on those little frontmans. I has the jack break completely off of the board, so it took alot of careful soldering to make it work. It is still not exactly rigt, I couldn't quite repair the ground. I was able to get a genuine fender jack though, so I had the right part.
 
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