New Rat Day

[Chistopher]

I discovered a new guitar store a medium sized drive away and saw that they had a modded '86 Rat (that's the first year they did black face, for those who care) for $60. It had a few mods done. The guy who worked there explained that it belonged to one of the old shop techs there and he didn't know exactly what was done to it, but that it definitely didn't sound like a normal Rat.

1 - There was a hole drilled in the front the size of an LED. Its not as plug and play to install an LED to a Rat as you would think, but I plan to finish this mod with my own LED.

2 - The normal Rat feet were replaced with glue on feet

3 - The Rat normal has two legs to the gain stage. One boosts almost the full spectrum, and one boosts all frequencies above 1k. If you do the Reutz mod, you get rid of the 1k midhump the Rat is famous for as well as basically turning the Rat into an overdrive. This guy removed the other leg (Basically did the opposite of the Reutz mod) and shifted the 1k leg down quite a bit. I haven't done the math, but I suspect it's closer to 700k now.

4 - The tone control is now more subtle. This should play nicely with the mod I use to fix the Rats filter taper

I've never been impressed by anyone else's mods before, but man this Rat is very cool. It no longer sounds like a Rat, but rather a Tubescreamer on steroids. Plays very well with single coils

 

[Chistopher]

My mods are going to be:

Replace silicon diodes with germanium to increase distortion amount. This will give me more useful range of the gain knob and more maximum gain at the expense of lower maximum output.

Install red LED where hole was drilled

Improve taper of tone control with a parallel resistor and then modifying the filter cap.

 

[JMP/HBE]

Nice score, those all original go for $600+. Some on reverb have a $1500+ asking price.
I bought a Big Box the RAT reissue today. Its got several upgrades and can be run @ 9 & 18v.
Looking forward to that. Cheers.

 

[Chistopher]

I've decided I'll be changing the modified gain structure to the specs on my Rat2. The lower gain sounds are fun, but there's not enough gain on it as is, and I don't want to swap out the stock diodes, for mojo reasons.

My modified gain structure keeps the Rat mid spike, but increases the bass frequencies at low gain and widens the range of useful low gain tones.