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A bit of Muff Fuzz

After the success of Pete's Bazz Fuss I figured it was my own turn. I've only ever used stripboard in the past, but wanted to have a go at building a circuit on perfboard instead, so wanted to choose something relatively simple for a first go. The circuit I chose was the EHX™Muff Fuzz™ which despite it's name os more of an overdrive than a fuzz type effect.

I drew up my own perfboard layout as below, taking care to make sure the components could be connected easily when soldering.


Soldering up was relatively painless, and I was quite please with the neatness. You can see from the pic below that it is a mirror image of the layout above.


I used 2N5088's for the transistors and 1N60P for the diodes. The picture below shows the component side of the board prior to shortening the transistor legs. 



It worked pretty much straight away to my relief, and sounded OK, so I boxed it up in a 1590A sized box (always a painful process) and here is the finished article. I just stuck some labels on for now so I wouldn't forget what was inside, but might (unlikely) paint the enclosure at some point.


I'm quite satisfied with the result. It's a decent sounding overdrive, however, it's only around unity gain with the volume maxed out. That being said, I tried it with a not-so-new 9V battery (plugged in externally just in case anyone is under the misconception that I squeezed a battery in there) which was only putting out about 7.8V, so it might sound better when I plug in a decent 9V supply. 

I'll try to add some sound clips later.






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