Wattkins Amp Forums are discussion forums dedicated to the construction and modification of tube (valve) guitar & bass amplifiers.

Why "Wattkins"?

Wattkins Amp Forums were founded by members of 18watt.com. Today's 18 watt amps came, by way of Jim Marshall's 18 watt Bluesbreaker amp, out of Charlie Watkins's earlier design for the Watkins/WEM Dominator. So, given the heritage, we thought wattkins.com was actually a pretty cool name to collectively describe this group of forums, especially as the new spelling describes the purpose of our community.

WATT:

1. a unit of power equal to 1 joule per second; the power dissipated by a current of 1 ampere flowing across a resistance of 1 ohm

KINS:

1. a person's relatives collectively; kinfolk.
2. family relationship or kinship.
3. a group of persons descended from a common ancestor or constituting a family, clan, tribe, or race.
4. a relative or kinsman.
5. someone or something of the same or similar kind: philosophy and its kin, theology.
   –adjective
6. of the same family; related; akin.
7. of the same kind or nature; having affinity.
   —Idiom
8. of kin, of the same family; related; akin: Although their surnames are identical they are not of kin.

History

These forums originally came out of an over-abundance of discussions on 18watt.com surrounding the Epiphone Valve Junior amp and there was some concern over 18watt.com's focus being lost. Instead of outright banning the discussion of single-ended amps, in May 2007, the Admins at 18watt.com did a very smart thing and provided the seed capital to set up a new discussion board for single-ended amps. sewatt.com is the result.

However, the new admins of sewatt.com realized that it might eventually suffer the exact same problem and decided to design the new forums to be as inclusive as possible while providing separate discussion areas for the different genres of guitar amplifiers.

As a result, a group of discussion forums were created around the the "watt" theme under the general name "Wattkins Amp Forums". The following sites are all part of wattkins.com:

* ppwatt.com (for push-pull amps)
* sewatt.com (for single-ended amps)
* 45watt.com (for JTM45 & Bassman amps)
* wattkins.com (a place for the amp building community to hang out)

Hopefully, the spirit of 18watt.com continues here.