I’ve been working on this older Warwick rig steampunk conversion for a few months. Phase one was just painting the stripped-down rig and doing the stenciled accents. Now we’re on to part two; wiring in the lights and doing some work on the speaker jacks. Fortunately, I have a student who wants to learn electronics and she wants to help out with completing this build during her lesson time. Win-win.

I’ve always visualized the completed product with lighting inside the front grill section to illuminate the bronze paint and the silver ports. So today we took an LED lighting kit and figured out how to attach the strips discretely to the grill cover as a unit; it’s attached to the grill and is completely out of the way if/when the speakers need servicing. Then we spliced in a wiring harness to attach the top and bottom strips of LEDS. So far so good.

When Chris Welborn initially dropped this rig with me it was pretty beat up; his cats had torn up the carpeting covers. He removed the carpeting and took the cabinets down to the plywood. After that, he dropped them with me, simply telling me to do whatever I felt moved to do. I checked in with him a bit along the way, and I think we’re getting closer to the final product. Some new amp corners have to be installed, and a few other tweaks…but we’re in the home stretch.

Here’s what this cab looked like, brand new. This pic is from the Warwick website.

And here’s where the rig has progressed to now…

A few parts are on the way to me, and I’ll get them installed shortly. So there should be another update shortly…stay tuned!