Great Experience With A Mercury Magnetics Warranty Claim

[flemingmras]

Just thought I'd share with everyone a great warranty claim experience I had with Mercury Magnetics recently. As some of you may remember, Toddman had posted up a homebuilt JTM-45 clone with a Mercury Magnetics Radiospares clone that he'd had problems with right out the gate. He posted pics...everything looked right. OP stated all the voltages looked right. We tried to help him and he finally reached the breaking point.

So I sent him a PM that if he's done trying to fix it himself that I'd be more than willing to help. All the way from Venice FL he shipped his amp to me and I got right on it.

Plugged it in and did a tone test...MAN did it have low output. You had to crank the shit out of it to get any kind of volume out of it. The preamp overdrive was rather musical...just did not have hardly any volume to speak of.

I read the DC resistance of the OT against the new RS clone OT I had in a BBRI that I was upgrading and everything read right. Checked voltages...everything was on the money. Tested the valves in another amp...valves were good. Then I checked the drive signal right on the output valve grids and had plenty...in the range of 35-40VAC at the phase inverter output and that right there pretty much told me what the problem was.

So I temporarily wired in a spare OT (the stock one from the BBRI) and the amp came to life! That told me that the OT was no good.

Called Toddman, got a run down of the history on the build and found out that this amp had the problem right out the gate. He thought he wired it wrong...I verified that it was correct. So I told him that MM has a 10 year warranty on their transformers so let's get them involved and I'll send it back to them.

I send it back and they receive it. The next day I get a call from Paul Patronette at MM and he says "Well Jon...it was our fault".

Now the RS clone, like the original, has a "not-so-common" secondary that is actually 3 seperate coils that all have to be wired together in a series/parallel or parallel/series config to achieve a certain output impedance. Well Paul went on to state that there was a run of the RS clone OTs that had one or two of those secondary coils wound backwards by mistake. And normally on any other OT you can reverse them and it will work. But on this one, due to the way they're interleaved that will not work and the OT is basically junk. Paul went on to inform me that they had a brand new one that they've already tested and verified to be good and would be shipping it to me that day.

Received the OT a couple of days ago. Finished up the amp yesterday and now she's got all the volume she's supposed to have.

I have to say Mercury Magnetics is a stand-up company and will honor their 10 year warranty on their products if the problem is deemed to be their fault. It's companies like these that I personally admire and is one of the main reasons why I am glad to be doing business with them as a dealer.

[jcmjmp]

I've had nothing but great experiences with MM, even with my custom PT.

[joey]

Yeah!, good luck trying to get any needed technical specs out of them besides a primary impedence. A lot of respectable builders have had horror stories regarding them, and they try to make sleazy deals if you send them Iron, particularly if they want it, I have a good story regarding that!