It's been a long time coming (actually, just about a year), but my new custom-ordered, hand-made Straub Cantus 50W all tube head w/2X12 cabinet is finally done! I will take delivery this Thursday and I cannot wait!

Beautiful!  I love those knobs.
John

That looks great!!

Very nice Kevin  

Thanks much all!
 
The knobs are from Roger at THG. It's hard to tell from the pics, but they are cocobolo inlayed with the Straub logo as on the faceplates of the amp and cab (i.e., tube with a S inside) in Mother Of Pearl.
 
The cabs are solid African Sappelle...suposedly a mahogany family wood...with a lot of colorful striping. The faces are solid flame maple. If you look closely, you can see the laser-engraved backlit plexiglas control panel (lit by red superbright LED's...an upgrade over the stock CCT lighting).

Here's some more pix:
 
 
 

The back is off the amp (head) as Harry Straub was voicing the thing as he shot these pix. It took him about a month to fine-tune the thing as he is very anal about the sound (That is what you are paying for after-all). Complicating matters was the new, extremely tight (and therefore hard to break-in) British Celestion 25W 16ohm Greenbacks. He played the hell out of the thing, and went through a bunch of tubes before he settled on the JJ EL-34's and 12AX7's.
 
You can see the Superbrights glowing, as well as those magic glass valves in the last pic.
 
The cab was custom-made to my specs by Bill over at Sultone who graciously allowed Harry to laser-engrave a matching Straub logo on his cab. Harry had both cabs finished in catalysing lacquer together (after engraving) so that they would match, and he supplied the raw speakers, wiring, jacks and the install. As Harry only hand-makes TEN amps a year, he was just too busy to handle the woodworking chores, so Bill got the nod. The workmanship is outstanding. You may have noticed the three-piece back (an option) which allows THREE cab configurations (i.e., closed-back, 1/3 open-back, and 2/3 open-back) depending on the venue and/or player's preference. You may also notice the trick Neutrik locking 1/4 parallel phone jacks and the Neutrik Parallel Speakons on the cab. I prefer Speakons, virtually unheard of in the guitar realm but commonplace in the bass-players realm, as they are superior to phone jacks in every way for high-current signals. The 1/4 jacks are for a safety net in case a Speakon cable fails...there's always a spare 1/4 speaker cable floating around at a gig somewhere, LOL!  
 
You can also see one of the custom made flight cases Harry had made for the head and cab in the backround of the upper pic.

For those that missed my past posts:
 
This is a 50W all-tube hand-made hard-wired discrete Marshall Plexi-style amp with custom master volume and boost circuits (additional tube gain stage). It's Harry's own proprietary design. In addition to the super-high quality standard components, I also spec'd Mil-spec sealed pots, a tube rectifier (GZ-34), Mercury Magnetics Transformers as upgrade options. The thing truly is a work of art!

Now all I need (besides talent, LOL!) is one of Mica's custom Alembic guitars to go along with it. My new Custom Orion IV bass could use a )matching?) little brother.
 
Cheers,
 
Kevin
 
PS, I'll be sure to let the club collective know how the thing sounds when I put 'er through it's paces later this week. Time to bone-up on my Hendrix and Page chops it appears, LOL!

Awesome Kev!!!!   Here's one that I salvaged from work the other day~ my project for the month:  

 

  Its a Stromberg/Carlson AU57~ 3channel p.a. head w/ 2 6L6's for the power amp... I have to see how it turns out, but I have a feeling it will find a home on top of one of my JBL equipped Showman cabs....

Cool, Mike!
 
That thing is built like a tank. It should crank pretty good. You can't beat that old valve stuff.

Next up is a new custom wood cab by Sultone for my old silverface Fender Twin Reverb combo amp. Slightly bigger size with new 12 Weber VST JBL D-120 clones (a la Jerry Garcia, et al) made out of solid mahogany with a flame maple center stripe, custom grille cloth and oversized solid mahogany partial back plates. A flight case completes the picture.  
 
These mods should transform an already decent CLEAN amp (the distortion is horrible) into a phenomenal clean amp. Bill at Sultone is a Fender tube amp fanatic and is particularly adept at turning shrill, tinny, flabby bass stock amps into warm, sweet sounding gems with full extended bass. I should be getting that one shortly as well. it'll be a fairly simple turm-key affair: all I have to do is remove the old amp chassis and the accutronics spring reverb tank from the old cab and screw them into the new one.
 
This should give me the best of both worlds: a nice dirty amp for blues and rock (Straub); and a nice amp for jazz and other undistorted sounds (Fender).
 
Anybody looking to upgrade the sound of any amp head, combo or speaker cab should give Bill Boekhoff at Sultone a shout. His work is top shelf, and his prices are unbelievably reasonable. Harmony-Central has a lot of nice review about his cabs.

Beautiful amp, love the wood. You're not really gonna take it out of the house are you ? lol  
Much too nice to risk damage.
I'd also really be interested in seeing how the twin comes out.
G