Bargain Tube Amps?

[Steel and wood]

True Fender tube amps stop at the Blues Junior in my opinion. (Anything cheaper with tubes sounds less and less Fender).

[moon]

This Ampmaker WF-55 is quite a bargain at £155 (5F1 Tweed Champ).

So is the PP-18 at £230 (18W Marshall 1974x)

Both absolute classics - but you've got to build them yourself.

[Br1ck]

You can get a Fender silverface Music Master bass amp, basically a 12 watt toy of a bass amp. Totally useless for bass, but with a decent guitar speaker installed, a true sleeper. You'll need pedals for reverb and perhaps something for EQ but you will have vintage Fender 6V6 tone.

You can get a Trace Elliot Vellocette for a wickedly loud 18 watts. These came with Celestion speaker. Again, only volume and tone control. EL 84s in this one. Gibson bought Trace out and quickly ran it into the ground. I have a Gibson labeled version. They run tubes hard but EL 84s are cheap. Early variants ( Trace) were known to blow transformers, but they solved that and certainly any Gibson amps had that solved. The best tube blues tone came after blowing one of the EL 84s. Unfortunately I would not recommend playing the amp like that.

Any tweed Peavey Classic 30 is a great amp.

[Outhouse]

The new Vox ac10 for 440 ish sounds like a nice way to go

[roylor4]

Originally Posted by Danley

A really FUN amp... Might be a Champion 600 . They're basically toys, but easy to bend the circuit, fun at low volumes with the low efficiency six incher, can get a pretty cool sound through a cabinet.

Not very useful or versatile (if you need those things), but amazing how fun it is to crank this tiny, pissed off little amp and play it like you want to wreck it just to see what you can coax out of it (have a tweed mod on mine).

Yeah, I have a reissue Champ 600. Sounds great with blues harp - much louder and thicker sound than you would expect.

I have owned dozens of great, small tube amps over the years - these are the best and all affordable if you can find them:

Older stuff:
#1 - Kalamazoo model 1 - Blackface - 10" speaker - it will obliterate a Gibson Skylark and a tweed Champ. EL84 monster, about 4 or 5 watts

#2 - Alamo Challenger - Bigger speaker, cab and sound than any tweed champ i ever played. 5 watter

#3 - Silvertone model 1482 - HUGE ten watts out of a very light package, 12" speaker and a beautiful tremelo circuit. A poor mans Deluxe.

Newer stuff

VHT Special or Ultra 6
Peavey Royal 8
Epiphone Valve Junior

I can't say enough about the Kalamazoo model 1. Still feel like a moron for having sold it. Older Alamos and Silvertones are pretty cool too but the new stuff that is being made is as good or better (minus the mojo cool points for historical vibe).

[Dustin_J]

It's hard to do much better than a used Peavey Classic 30 for ~300, especially if you can get on of the newer ones with the tube "Cage"/keeper.