Since it doesn't seem like anyone has heard of IronHorse I wanted to give an update on this...
I decided to go ahead and see what these IronHorse amps are all about and have one built. I emailed the owner back and forth over the last couple of days and talked with him yesterday.
The owner/builder's name is Key Phillips. He has been very responsive to my emails and even before I actually talked to him offered to send a prebuild amp to a local music store for me, them and anyone else to demo for a couple of weeks; no charge to me or the store. unfortunately all that's near me is guitar center so it was a nice offer but not really an option. When I did call I talked to him for just over an hour and a half. Right off he felt like a pretty straight forward and really good guy. We talked a little about music in general, the industry, and he was telling me about how he was involved with the Alice Cooper Teen Center foundation. He will build and donate amps to them throughout the year.
As far as discussing the build, he took the time to tell me about the circuit he designed and why he did certain things with it. He went over a number of optional elements like a mid boost and edge switches. He talked about where he put these things in the circuit, why he decided to put them there, how it affected the character, etc. He pretty much did that with every aspect of the amp. He told me about a few ideas he was working on for other additions and if they seemed to work out well he could throw them into my build just so he could get additional feedback on it. Another aspect was that if I had any ideas he would see about working something up. On thing I asked about was since I'm not a pristine clean player to shift the gain range on the clean side where it started at more of a dirty clean and overlapped the gain side more. He said that was an easy one for him to do. He even sent me a pdf of a schematic he was working on that included the things I was wanting and a few of those extras he was toying with. It was dated from the day before so he must have just finished working it up.
We mainly discussed the Copperhead because after talking about what I was thinking that one seemed to fit best. I have a crap ton of notes I scribbled to sort through, but a couple of key elements about the Copperhead are: Tone wise it was described as being on the British side having the upper mid range bite, but isn't a Marshall clone and has it's own thing going. It's a single channel amp with a separate clean and dirty gain pathway. Both gain pathways share the same tone stack. Tone stack is the basic high, mid, low. There is no presence or resonance control. He opted to leave those out in leu of what he termed a bright cut knob. My understanding of this is that instead of boosting the super high frequencies you use the bright cut to roll them off. There's 4 gain stages. Default is pentode, but he can add pentode/triode if you want. There is a preamp volume but no master volume. He designed a proprietary output control circuit. He described it as not a master volume, more like a powersoak but not a powersoak either. He explained how it operated and where it was in the circuit. That part was going over my head a bit. My take away was it controlled overall volume and didn't change the tone. There's an optional effects loop which he described as highly transparent. He said the loop can add about 6db and could be jumpered to use as a volume boost. Last few other things; preamp tubes are 12AX7 & power tubes are EL34, but if you wanted him to make it for 6L6 he could though not recommended., He uses between 40 -60 watt transformers, depending on what you want. All components used are high quality and as many as possible being used are USA made.
For shop operation, he's the main designer/builder and has been working on amps for at least the last 25-30 years. He also has 2 younger guys working with/for him. The way he describe it he was teaching the 2 guys with him about the whole design & build process; like he was mentoring them to carry on the amp building tradition. He did say that any builds they work on he triple checks their work and holds them to the same high standards before approving it.
When order, like I just did you'll go over all the aspect you want then confirm all the details. He'll send you pretty much anything yo ask for to help you make the final decisions. After that he can work up a quote and give a build time frame. Pay a 30% deposit and he'll send updates and pictures along the way once he starts the build. So far all of that seem pretty typical of any custom build. Once it's done any you receive the amp he gives you 30 days to evaluate and make any tweaks no charge. After that he'll warrantee everything but the tubes and speaker (if getting a combo) to the original owner for the life of the amp. Prices are variable depending on which options you want and can range from about $2000-$3000 and typically fall right in the middle.
Overall it sounds like it'll be a well built, solid amp. Key seems to be a good trustworthy guy; I didn't get any bad vibes from him. Everything appears fully legit. I'm at the process of finalizing the details of the build so he can work up a quote. I'll start a separate thread on the build process and post updates along the way.
