Barclay

Barclay were not made in Australia but many amps and guitars were imported and sold under the Barclay name and it is not uncommon for a repairer to come across the the odd one.

Barclay served the very bottom end of the market and never made any impression with bigger amplifiers.

This example illustrates many of the subtle differences in components and construction practices between amps imported from Asia and those made here.

On the front panel the pilot light, power switch and knobs were all available here as imports, the knobs at least coming from Sato in Japan.

When A&R Transformers morphed into the A+R Sonar Group they started importing components from Asia, one of the first companies to do so, their two main lines were Elna capacitors and Sato hardware; knobs, switches and other panel furnature.

But internally the grey dumbel-style resistors are a dead give-away that it's not constructed in Australia, note also the 500k non-prefered resistor value on the socket at left. Similarly note the valve sockets consisting of two insulating wafers of SRBP.

The first stage is a 6AV6 triode-double-diode, nominally for use in the detector stage of AM radios. In this case the diodes would be ignored and it used just as a simple triode amplifier, very similar to a single 12AX7 stage.

The use of full-length component leads insulated where required by a woven brown or dark brown slip-over, and little or no light guage hookup wire, are also signs of an Asian-constructed import.

Another feature is the metalwork. No matter how cheap Japanese amplifiers of the period were made, they always tended to have reasonable metalwork, as here.

The speaker, marked 3 watts 8 ohms, is also very typical of the breed.

Click on images to enlarge, all about 50k jpg

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