Fender Champ 12 opinions

Anyone have any particular horror stories about this amp? I know about the over-ambitious overdrive channel, but that is apparently easily tamed, and overall people seem to like it, especially it's surprisingly sturdy construction. I have a chance to pick one up at a decent price and it might just be the cheap but tasty practice tube-box I've convinced myself I need, thanks for useful views and experiences.

A Greenback might be good.

Seeing as everything was on a PCB, I never changed anything other than the tubes on that amp.

fwiw, it's a very high gain SE 6L6 10watt amp, with a 12" speaker, in an unusually small package.

I think it's probably one of the earliest "built like shit" Fenders.
The input jacks are really bad, and it's a cheap enclosed jack that's attached to a PCB, so it's not as simple as just replacing it with a good Switchcraft jack. The reverb is really bad. There seems to be some sort of box on the PCB that's the reverb. There's no speaker jack, just a couple wire going to the speaker. The speaker is pretty bad.

I owned one for years. Mostly, it just sat there unused. I'd never own another one. I can't imagine that any of the worst mass produced amps being made today could be any worse.

If you ask me, it was a rather disgraceful effort by Fender, and I'm not convinced that being an inexpensive amp was an adequate excuse.

It did however have an interesting way to mount the speaker baffle board/grill cloth. You remove the two screws from the side of the amp, and it comes out the front. So if you do buy a Champ12, and you decide you need to upgrade the speaker, don't pull the chassis out (easier said than done) to get at the speaker, look for those screws on the side, and the thing pops right out.

If 'decent' is around $125, it's an OK practice amp.

Regular SF champ or vibrochamp blows the doors off the champ 12.

Hmmm, some of your points I've read elsewhere, although some folks didn't seem to have any trouble replacing the plastic jacks and power switch, there is also supposed to be an inexpensive kit available to tame the raspy overdrive channel, and some people report upgrading the speaker to a
Celestion or whatever makes a huge difference. It seems to me like one of those amps with enough annoying qualities that it's easy to write off, but a few fixes improves it a lot, the question being is it worth the time and effort to fix it in the first place or just look for something else? Thanks for your comments.