Silvertone was not a maker. It was Sears, Roebuck's house brand, and the amplifiers sold under it were built to order by other companies and identified in service literature by a Sears chassis number rather than by a circuit designation — which is why the entries in this family are catalogued by the number stamped on the chassis plate. Danelectro of Neptune City, New Jersey built the guitar amplifiers of the 1960s line, and its house style is nothing like Fullerton's or Chicago's. A Danelectro-built Silvertone puts its tone controls between two gain stages rather than in one stack after the first; gives each channel its own Bass and Treble instead of sharing a network; sums the channels through resistors into a mixer node; and, in the larger amplifiers, reaches for a nine-pin 6CG7 where an American maker would have reached for a 12AX7 or a 12AT7. Two habits are more distinctive still. The supplies are solid-state early and unusually — a stacked capacitor multiplier building a high rail out of low-voltage electrolytics, years before Fender let a silicon diode near a guitar amplifier. And the tremolo is optical: a neon lamp facing a photocell inside a sealed module, which is what gives these amplifiers their slow, soft modulation instead of the era's usual chop. Sears sold them by catalogue, cheaply, in enormous numbers, which is the other reason they matter — more players learned on one of these than on anything with a nameplate.
| Designation | Years | Watts | Output stage | Key change | Circuit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 185.11040 | 1963–1967 | 60 W | push-pull 2×6L6GC | The big one, and the circuit this corpus documents: a piggyback head over a 2×12 cabinet, eight bottles, reverb and tremolo, and a 60 W catalogue rating. Four 12AX7s, two 6CG7s and two 6L6GCs, with no rectifier tube anywhere — the 480 V rail is built by stacking four 100 µF · 150 V electrolytics behind four 1N3194 diodes, and a fifth diode makes the −36 V fixed bias for the output pair. Both preamp channels' first triodes share one cathode resistor; each channel carries its own Bass, Treble and Volume between the first and second stages; the two are summed through 68 kΩ each into a 560 kΩ mixer node. The phase inverter is a cathodyne on one half of a 6CG7, its 68 kΩ plate load matched against 68 kΩ in the cathode and its grid returned to the cathode tap. Reverb runs a CS55 spring unit driven by the second 6CG7 at 10 mA; tremolo runs a 306-2H light-operated modulator — a neon lamp and a photocell in one sealed part. The drawing carries no date; the bracket is the model's published introduction and withdrawal, with a pot-code-dated 1965 example inside it. Sources for 185.11040 (4)
| S1484 draft ↗ |
The circuit column says how far this model has been documented, in three states. A circuit ↗ badge links a verified circuit: redrawn schematic, parts list, and a simulated operating point held against the published voltage chart under a maintainer's sign-off. A draft ↗ badge links a circuit that is drawn, sourced and published, but has not completed that chain — its own page states what is unresolved. A history entry is placed, dated and sourced here, but its circuit isn't drawn at all yet.
Each model's own citations are listed in its row above, under “Sources for …”. The complete data behind this line — every model's fields as stored, including those the page doesn't print — is in history/families/silvertone.yaml.