#ledmod

The ever popular LED mod for the solid-state Vox Pathfinder amps, now sadly discontinued.  I took these pics and detailed the instructions for a thread at ilovefuzz.com.  Better than this, TweedBassman, the man behind Penny Pedals, came up with a mod for deeper tremolo.  Just 'cause I asked if he knew of one.  Total mensch move there.  That's next.  Original thread here: http://ilovefuzz.com/viewtopic.php?f=192&t=35115

De-construction and LED mod steps.  (This is for my Korean-made 15R.  No guarantees that yours will have the same board layout, though others seem to, including some Vietnamese made amps.)

1) Unplug the power.  Remove the back panel screws.  If your PCB looks exactly like mine and you don't want to do the trem mod (and you should really want to do the trem mod because it's awesome) you can just locate and desolder the LEDs and let them rattle out the back, possibly with some light tilting/shaking.  Skip ahead to step 6 if that's your game plan.

2) Carefully remove the two screws in line with the knobs that are all that is holding the chassis to the cabinet.  Carefully because now the chassis is rattling around loose.  The real gotcha is make sure you don't let a corner of the chassis rip the cone of the speaker, since that would suck.

3) Remove the knobs by pulling them straight up off of the pot shafts.  Remove the nuts holding the pots to the chassis and the nut from the input jack.  10mm socket wrench for the pot nuts on mine.  Never figured for the plastic nut on the jack since I could just unscrew it with my hand.

4) See the two little screws roughly on line above the speaker wires?  Unscrew them, retaining them and their lock washers.  These hold the mounting bracket that the PCB is attached to.

5) If you're a lazy idiot like me, gingerly try to wriggle the pcb and the pots out from the chassis so you can get at the component side of the pcb.  Smarter move would be to remove the other components at the bottom side of the chassis, particularly the power transformer, so the board would more easily slide down and out.  With my way, you're at risk of doing something bad bending the pots to the point of damage.  I'd suggest doing it the long way, but I don't have those steps handy.  If I ever do this again, I'll try to report the additional steps.

6)  Locate the LEDs.  These guys are always in the signal path stock and give the fuzzy distortion character whenever the gain is up more than a little.  You can still get some decent amp dirt without them, and better, you can enjoy more of the character of your guitars and pedals into the amp.  Oh, and louder -- diode clipping costs in volume, and you get a good bunch back.  Once you've spotted them, you have options.  Easy way is to remove them with a diagonal cutter on the component side.  (If you clip them, make sure you don't leave junk that shorts the two leads of each LED.)  What I did was take my soldering iron and a desoldering braid to the solder side and applied pressure and heat first to the left and then the right two leads, melting and wicking off the solder.  Hitting two leads at once means the other isn't still holding the component in place.  Gravity will do the rest.  Might as well clean up the pads afterwards if you're doing it this way to ensure the left-over solder won't bridge the connections.