Mark iii re-cap and mods

[robvoyles]

Hi, anyone here re-cap and mod there mark iii's themselves, im pretty handy with soldering ( i build my own control boards for hvac and building automation ) and have done some mods in the past and boogie is 2 months out on sending it in so i thought i would reach out to you guys to see if any of you do them yourselves. All i need to know is which caps are the main ones changed and which ones might give my black dot a bit more gain on the R-2 channel. + mod from what i saw in a video wasn't to involved all though i may have missed something. Any thoughts are welcomed. I have attached an HVAC training board i built for my son to learn basic control for heat and cooling systems, just to give you an idea of a bit of experience i have.
Thank,s Rob

 

[Fastforded]

No, wasnt worth it to chance messing it up. And who knows if there were any problems I wouldn't know.

Paid a professional, Mike from mesa. Worth every penny.

 

[Appleridge]

FWIW, I’ve been told 12 months out and it came back in 2ish. My IIB was quoted at 3 months and it was 1.5. Not to say it won’t be 3 months, but in my experience they have always beaten the quote.

Another consideration, a mark III+ modded by Mike B vs a mark III+ modded by the owner are 2 very different amps when selling!!

Just a few thoughts to consider! There are some VERY intelligent people on this forum that will likely have answer for you…this viewpoint comes from someone who thinks electricity is magic lol. Good luck!

 

[modder]

I've done some basic modding but paid someone good with a soldering iron to do most of the work after delaminating the board on my first go. The PCB is pretty fragile, so I don't recommend working on it unless you're experienced with electronics soldering, as opposed to say a guitar.

 

[JustPassingThrough]

Replacing caps is a simple process. The filter caps are the big ones, typically blue. They come out, new ones go in.

You can just snip the cap off the legs then solder the new caps there by wrapping the new legs around the old and soldering it together. Electronically it's all the same. Just make sure you get the orientation the same as it was (electrolytics are polarised).

 

[VisaL]

Are you sure you need to recap? Does the amp hum excessively? I just did a recap for studio .22 just for the heck of it. Bias caps were really fried and needed replacing. After I got the filter caps out i measured them and those gave better results than new f&ts, so it was complete waste of time. I originally contemplated on doing recap on my mk3 but since there’s absolutely no sign whatsoever, i decided to leave em alone. It’s not like those could catastrophically fail at any given then and ruin the whole amp. It’s pure money grap from ’techs’ to claim elcos need to be changed every 10-20 years.

 

[JustPassingThrough]

Yeah that's not how it works. You can't test a filter cap out of the circuit. It'll read whatever value it's meant to 99% of the time because it's not under load or current so how are you testing for leakage or ESR for example.

Changing filter caps after 20 years, especially if they're not used often, is prudent general maintenance.