Things With Strings

It's been ages since I built an effects pedal, so to get my soldering chops back up to speed, I decided I'd build a simple fuzz pedal for my long-time friend Pete as a surprise present for his impending birthday. The circuit I chose was the Bazz Fuss (yes that's the correct name)  which you can read about here if you care to. I went for the basic v1.0 of the circuit and used a 2N3904 for the transistor, and boxed everything in a 1590A sized enclosure. Despite a number of stupid mistakes that I had to rectify, I got it all done and boxed within a day, complete with lo-fi graphics. Here's a gut-shot. gut-shot And here is the finished item. lo-fi graphic It sounded OK when I played it although it needed the volume knob maxxed out to get the best out of it. Maybe a higher gain transistor would have been better still. I'm pretty sure Pete will like it though.

Buoyed by the success of last month's " Chafer Drive ", I've been busy drawing up layouts for a few more small effects that I want to build, and first up is a tribute to the " Shin Ei Companion Fuzz FY-2 ". This was a Japanese fuzz pedal made in the 1970's and is generally well-regarded in the DIY effects community for it's classic fuzz tones. The original came in a large wedge shaped box, but my plan was to squeeze it into a Hammond 1590A  just as I did with the " Chafer Drive ". This was undoubtedly going to be more challenging, since (a) the circuit is larger, and (b) it has two control knobs as opposed to one. I had some standard 25 x 9 stripboard  which I thought would be ideal for this purpose, so I challenged myself to layout the circuit with that in mind. The original circuit use some obscure  2SC536 transistors (Hfe 160-560) that were no longer manufactured,  but I had a whole bunch of 2SC1685  (Hfe 160-460) transistors that I...

Today I was on holiday from work, but I'd also done some thing to my back that meant once I sat down, I was in danger of not being able to stand up again, and my intentions to go out on my bike and put some miles in were well and truly scuppered. So to keep myself active, and in a standing position, I decided to prepare a couple of boxes in advance. These were  1590A  size boxes and I was preparing them for some effect that will have a single control. First I printed out templates which I downloaded from madbeanpedals.com  and taped these to the boxes. Then I used a centre-punch to mark the location of each hole I wanted to drill in order to guide the drill. enclosures with drill templates and tools In the picture above, you can see the two enclosures with drilling templates attached, together with a centre-punch, a couple of step drill-bits and a 3mm drill-bit for the LED. And here is what a box looks like once it's been centre-punched. enclosure w...

Background I was talking to my brother-in-law last December and mentioned that I was hoping to re-ignite my electronics hobby, mainly with the intention of building myself some guitar effect pedals. A month later, my brother and sister-in-law kindly gave me an Amazon gift card for my birthday (always appreciated), so I had the idea that come his birthday, I would repay the gift with a boutique, hand-made effect pedal. And so the story of the "Chafer Drive" begins. I thought a simple overdrive (mild distortion) with a single control knob fitted into the smallest possible enclosure would be appropriate, and it would be named the "Chafer Drive" because that, coincidentally, is his surname. The name has a triple meaning though, since a Chafer is a variety of beetle, and there is a party-game called a Beetle Drive , so we have Chafer - Beetle - Over - Drive, get it? Never mind! I though I'd also document the whole build process too, so he (any anyone else who...