What Does This Indicate?

[unclej]

a buddy brought me an old leslie amp/speaker combo to change out the input connector so that he could play guitar through it. when i first plugged it in the fuse was blown. the next one blew also. so i pulled the chassis and started checking for shorts. what i found was that the center tap and the two red high voltage wires from the power transformer were going to ground. i checked a tube amp that i know is working and those wires don't go to ground.

would this indicate a bad transformer or bad components?

[KeithHowell]

It could be either. Disconnect the transformer from the circuit and then do a check on the secondary. If you still see the ground problem you have a bad transformer if not probably a bad rectifier tube. (I presume it does have a tube and not solid state rectifier. You can probably just pull the rectifier tube to disconnect the transformer from the circuit, however I would need to see the circuit diagram to make sure of that.)

Keith

[truerussian558]

the center tap usually does go to ground, this way the circuit only requires 2 diodes to rectify the current (as apposed to a 4 diode rec bridge) and it always goes to ground with aps with a rectifier tube (as it is just 2 vacuum diodes in the same case) its possible that your known working tube amp has solid state rectification

[unclej]

thanks, this gives me a direction to work. it's solid state so with the shorting problem it could very well be bad diodes. i appreciate it.