So, following on from my good experience every time when info is needed from Fender, apparently backed up by Mr Cook's experience earlier this week, today I tried the same thing with another reputable company - Gibson, as in Les Paul.
I had a little Gibson Goldtone "Les Paul Junior" amplifier turn up, reported "dead". And indeed it was, because the fuse in the IEC inlet was blown, badly. It had an American power lead on it, plugged into UK adaptor, which started alarm bells ringing. I replaced the fuse, and wound the supply up on the variac, whilst monitoring the AC heater volts of the output valve. It was at exactly 6.3 volts when the variac was at about 110 volts, confirming that this was indeed a U.S. spec amplifier. A quick check with the owner revealed that it was a recent acquisition, and the person that sold it to him had told him that the adaptor was everything that it needed to make it work in the UK ...
Anyways, I digress. Looking at the transformer wiring, there was a couple of twisted pairs and a sealed-off white wire around the primary side of things, so I figured that this might well be a split primary tranny with the two windings currently in parallel, and a +10v tap that was unused. I went to the Gibson website to see if I could find a copy of the schematic to verify that it was indeed a 'universal' transformer. Of course, there was every schematic for every guitar and amplifier they have ever sold, except this little Junior ... So I emailed technical to ask for it. Some hours later, I got a reply from somewhere in Europe saying that they did not have the schematic, but fortunately, it was available on the net. This was followed by a link about a thousand characters long, to Google images, where there are several not-very-good GIF images that have been drawn by third parties. And of course, none of them have bothered to show a split primary transformer.
Sad to say, this made me a bit mad and I sent an email back telling them what I thought of a supposedly reputable large company that did not have schematics for products that they sold, and then had the gall to refer people to third party schematics on the net.
Fortunately, having many years of experience in this game, I managed to figure which wires were which, and to get the two windings wired in series and in the correct phase to make it 240 volt. But how much easier it would have been to have had a schematic with a configuration table to do it from.
Am I being unreasonable expecting them to have information on a product that they proudly put their name to ? I mean, this thing ain't cheap. Looking on the net, they seem to go for anything from $350 to $500 + which is a lot for a very simple 2 valve 5 watt amp ...
Arfa