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here is my slow loris build. paint is testor's one coat lacquer "fiery orange" I got a ton of testors spray paint at michaels on friday with 25% off.

I built it with a dpdt on-off-on incase I wanted to put led indicators, but I decided not to for now.

I love rats, and this is a great layout. I have used the tonepad board, vero, and the 4 knob rat boards from boardshop and this is the smallest and tidiest boards.

The sound is great and for some reason I feel like the filter control is smoother than my other builds I think I might have used a different taper on the pots before though.

for the artwork I was going to try to do some hippie looking tye-die stuff but I decided to do the bandana print instead. kind of sublte but I like it.

I am hoping to pick up a laser printer for etching/decals tomorrow.

I saw staples has the brother hl-2240 laser printer for 49.98 it's black and white. I saw it was recommend over at fsb.org so I think I am going to do it.

I kind of want to get a color laser for decals but I don't know if they will do as good a job as dedicated black and white printer.


also guitar center has guitar stands 2 for $10 tomorrow... well today actually it's 2 am.

painted in testor's diamond dust

I put the bmx on there because to me that is the modern centaur, and I hate astrology even though I am a sagittarius and the centaur is my sign. I also though it was a little tongue and cheek.

I used 1n34a for the diodes, and chose to leave the buffered bypass in. it was a little tricky fitting all the resistors on the switch. maybe next time I will use a x-wing switch.

all in all this was a pretty easy build or at least nothing went wrong for me. thanks madbean for the awesome directions even though I checked everything 3 or 4 times before soldering to make sure I had it right it fired right up the first time.

sound is killer, worth the work (actually ordering parts was the hardest work).

I am really pleased with the sound of this pedal.
with out getting all TGP on everybody it really is the perfect compliment to a strat. Especially the bridge pickup which sounds awesome with the fat pants. It thickens everything up, you still have the strat sound but it is just BETTER. the boost is mild but it's perfect I actually run everything cranked and it sounds great that way. Into my ghia clone it sounds really thick and woody, but I liked it even better into my crate vintage 20. The breakup was awesome and I had this sweet wilco "AM" tone.

I tried stacking it with a few other pedals and I thought it sounded best in front of my zendrive.

all in all great circuit small easy build. I did end up ordering the wrong kind of trimpots but I was able to bend the leads and get it to fit.

I put a bat on it because I didn't want to be so obvious with echoplex styled artwork. the paint is krylon sunshine yellow.

I ordered a 27nF cap for c13 and accidentally got 10mm lead spacing, I can't really rig it up to fit because it's the short 5mm legs. I have 22nf and 33nf can I get away with a sub here? I am not sure what c13 does.

I am waiting on some other caps so I could probably just order the right caps but I was just checking.

I saw a band last night and the guitar player was using the maxon fl-9 and it sounded awesome.

I looked at a couple of projects over on tonepad and they look really complex. I heard the electric mistress is really hard to do too, is there any way to make an easier flanger? I might just buy the ehx nano mistress but I heard they aren't as good as the older ones.

mudbunny with the mids switch mod. c10 goes to a dpdt with 10n on one side 4.7n on the other so you can select scooped mids or flat mids. the flat mids is absolutely ripping!

I have bc550's in it right now and it is a beast, I tried it with some other transistors and it sounded a little smoother and quieter but I really like the bc550's

I will update with my thoughts when I get more time to play around with the pedal. I have to go to a gig right now.

I built up my neutrino to the burst specs. I am getting radio stations when the tone knob is all the way up it goes away if I turn it down. even with not guitar or cable plugged in I am still getting radio interference.

I used topmay box caps for c4 and c5, metal film resistors, silver mica cap for c2.

I am also thinking about swapping out the gain pot for something bigger because the amount of gain while it's all usable I feel like it doesn't get all the way there. probably 500kb or 250kb.

I just bought a new guitar. 1987 MIJ 54' hartail stratocaster reissue. Pickups upgraded to fender custom shop 54's everything else stock. I think they did a really good job on the details. Button string tree, 8 hole 1 ply pick gaurd, truss rod on the body side, and kluson no-line tuners. The only things that are different are the 5 way selector, poly finish, and the knobs are a little off (54's had football selector switches and shorter skirt knobs) I paid $550 with the tweed case and he gave me the original pickups.

My concerns were noise, vintage frets, and the vintage neck but there is no noise, I like the frets, and the neck feels good to me. I was a little worried about not having a tremolo bridge, but I knew 95% of the time I would never use it, and I would probably end up blocking it up anyways.



I probably won't do anything to it except maybe get some aged knobs to match the pup covers.



It's a really light body without the trem bridge very comfortable to hold, and the sustain is awesome.

I know these are two different kind of circuits the ego/ocd being more of a distortion and the serendipity/zendrive being a tubescreamer based circuit but I keep going back and forth comparing them.

The main issue for me is I love the zendrive and it sounds really great especially on longer chords and drawn out leads because the sustain is really good. but when I ab it with the ocd the ocd clearly has more bass. actually the ocd has more bass content than my bypass signal. and so when I go back and forth the ocd ends up sounding like the better pedal because it has a fuller tone.

I understood that the input cap has alot to do with bass to a circuit but the zen drive has the bigger cap. 470nf vs. 22nf I am guessing that maybe the output cap on the ocd being 10uF helps it's bass response vs. 470nF on the zendrive, but I also remember reading that the tubescreamer based circuits all have a problem with bass in general.

I also like the higher gain of the zendrive with the voice cranked but it gets really thin.

I use two matched, old-stock SINO 3AX31C germanium transistors. I decided to use a 1590BB enclosure for more space. It was SOO much easier than trying to do it with board mounted pots.
It sounds good. In fact I tried some random NTE 126 transistors and it sounded great with those too. I don't think it takes much mojo to get this circuit to do it's thing.

I made a dual gain snarkdoodle. The 3pdt switches between two different gain knobs. I was really worried that you would hear a pop or a gap when switching between the two different gains but you don't this trick worked great. I saw somebody do this with a dr. boogie to make a dual channel so I tried it with this and worked out great.

the artwork is all from dog day afternoon. I was wanting to use regular black (fulltone) style knobs but I am out so I just threw some chrome domes on there, but they look really cool with the halftone deniro kind of matching the knurled knobs. I still might switch back just so it's easier to see where the knobs are set to.

really awesome circuit. I really like the mix control and the deep mod. I can't really hear a whole lot of difference with WET mode on but I will try it out on bass tonight. The vibrato is cool you really have to dial back the depth to keep it usable but you can get some cool leslie sounds out of it.

I decided to mount the switches on the top to avoid them getting kicked. The fit is a little tight but it worked out. I will post a video when I get a chance later on tonight.

I put a little BOSS ce-2 love in there with the paint color, the knobs, the arrows, and the dots.

I tried to make a buffered ab-y switcher and it worked well with low watt amps in the house, but when I tried it with two marshall half stacks I had really bad noise and ground loop issues.

http://www.geofex.com/FX_images/humfree2.gif
http://generalguitargadgets.com/projects/15-boostersrouters/16-amp-aby-switcher-box

I came across this and it goes about half way to where I want to get which is basically the radial bones twin city buffered ab-y with phase switch and a ground lift. I am assuming I can put the ground wire to the B output on a spst switch just to cut it, but I am not sure how to do the phase flip. I know from my car stereo days you can wire a sub backwards flip the + and - to flip the phase, but this doesn't work with unbalanced guitar lines.

This is a great fuzz! I recommend it to everybody here at least throw one up on the breadboard. I have tried to make silicon fuzz faces before and they always sucked and had spitty nasty decay or sounded thin but this is really refined. The harmonic content is great (complex jazzy chords test) the clean up is also great which is unusual for a SI fuzz. I toyed with making a deluxe version but really you already have a gain control on your guitar and it works! Some fuzzes also seem like an "iron" that flatten over your tone so pickup selection doesn't matter but you can really hear the difference between pickups.

I ended up using 2n3904's in q1 and q2. I socketed and tried a bunch of different combos and this was my favorite. It is not overtly noisy at all.

I am not sure if my parts qualify as mojo or not, but I used lelon "sweet" tea electrolytics and panasonic ecq-e input and output caps. for some reason the output cap is alot smaller in size but I think I mouser was out of one of the voltage ratings so I got the next closest one. It doesn't really matter they sound fine, I was going to get some orange drops but they seemed really expensive compared to these caps.

This is my 3rd etched board, I am starting to get the hang of it. I am going to record a demo video and I will post it when I get it edited and uploaded.

I finished up my sabertooth build tonight. I actually had the circuit built up last week but I screwed up my decal so I had to wait till I had a chance to print it up again. this decal tore almost like 3 times. for whatever reason it was really brittle (this was the last page in my pack and it probably sat in the car for too long or something). I wasn't too happy about the decal but I went through with clearcoat and it looks like it isn't going anywhere now.

I already have a zvex mastotron which is the same circuit but smd with an impedance control (relax/push) and a subs switch that changes the input cap, but I always leave the impedance control maxed and the subs switch on 3 anyways which is pretty much the same as my build.

The pedal sounds great although I will probably either do some mods or build up another one with some mods. mainly just changing out the pots. I think the 2kb for the fuzz might sound better if I just use a 1kb like a fuzz face. All the good stuff is just bunched up at the end with a 2kb maybe even a 1kc if I can remember to order one. If you are building one and have a 1kb laying around just use that. The bite pot is also really bunched up at the bottom it goes from full on fuzz to gated really fast and it is hard to fine tune it. I would think lowering it to 250kb or even 100kb would help it feel better. there is really no point  for me in cranking it up the bite control it is just ridiculous splattyness.. especially with my p-90's they just don't put out enough.

Although I got some really funny sounds with a cranked mxr dyna comp in front of it because the attack was too quiet to overcome the gate effect and but the sustain would punch through so I almost had a fuzzy slow gear thing going on.

I skipped the onboard led switching because I have been using these true bypass boards from small bear and they have a led resistor and they keep my leds somewhat in place too in my preferred spot so it's easier to use those.

I saw this in the guitar center flyer. Exclusive guitar center pedal for a second I thought madbean had a pedal in guitar center now because they used the same font madbean uses.

I haven't seen the pedal but it looks really cheap. the tone knob is one of those little plastic trim pots. it looks really similar to this washburn distortion pedal I saw at target for $9.99. I wonder if it is smd.

http://www.lovepedal.com/pedals/superlead.html

I have had an OCD for a while now and It is one of my favorite overdrives, well at least its the one I always go back to for comparisons. I decided to just have fun with this build. There are no subs. I made one mistake and put one of the mosfets in backwards and when I tried to rework it but I couldn't get the holes cleared. one of the problems with through hole plated pcbs. I ended up just tying the mosfet in on the component side and it is holding and working fine like that.

Off the bat I can tell my build is quieter noise wise compared to the fulltone build. I can't really do a cranked demo right now but hopefully tomorrow I can do one.

The hardest part was spending time trying to find the right fonts for the graphics. I didn't realize it either until I was done painting that the fulltone pedal is an off white. If anybody wanted to know the fonts are comic sans, brush script standard, and gonzo.

I also moved my power switch to the input side because that is my favorite side to put it on.

It was a pretty tight fit getting the board in there. If I had to do it again I would try to get some of those mini electrolytics to keep the board height down. or I would use a cliff 125b enclosure.

I tried my first etch this weekend. The first board I etched was kind of random I just took one of the etch layouts off a rangemaster instructions that I had printed out on regular laser paper. I had a bit of trouble getting the toner to stick in all the places so I tried to go over it with a sharpie in the spots that didn't stick.

I etched it and I got really impatient and I thought the etchant wasn't working at that maybe I had bought the wrong kind of board or etchant. Then all of the sudden the copper started eating away and I got a little two excited and took it out to fast. I had shorts all over the board and I had to go through and scrape the shorts away, and then parts I had sharpied ended up being missing tracks. I drilled it anyways for practice, but I don't think it will work unless I do some sort of cross between pad per hole and pcb.

I read online that using magazine paper is a better transfer medium than lazer printer so I cut some sheets out of an old magazine and used the manual feed tray on the printer. The paper printed up really nicely. I decided to print up a WHOLE sheet of snarkdoodle layouts. I have probably made more red llamas than any other pedal so I figured I should do something I am used to building. In retrospect it probably isn't a good idea to do a board with a 16 pin DIP package because it isn't easy keeping the holes straight.

The magazine transfer was better, although it did take me 3 tries to get a clean transfer. The first one had missing tracks, the 2nd one came out blurry. For the 3rd try I cut the transfer alot wider on one side and I folded it under the board so that it wouldn't move as I ironed it. I pre heated the board for a minute and the toner stuck instantly. I ironed it for about 5 minutes more to be sure.

Then I let the board cool on it's own, which I think is an important step not to rush it into the water to allow the toner to bond properly with the board.

Then I soaked it for almost 10 minutes. online alot of people say 5 minutes but just be patient and leave it soaking. nothing bad will happen to it if you soak it too long. The paper was still a little hard to rub off and I was scared of pulling toner off so I took my time with this step.

I got a really clean toner image on the board so I was excited to try the etching.

I put it in ferric chloride at regular temp about 85. It seemed like it wasnt working at all but I kept brushing it over and over with a foam brush once It started eating away the copper it was pretty fast about a minute later I had all the copper off. I made sure it was all off this time before I soaked it in a cold water bath to stop the etching. I rinsed it alot and then took the toner off with acetone and had a beautiful perfect board.

I drilled it out on my big drill press with a diamond drill bit which ended up snapping in half, but I used the remaining half and it still worked. I had alot of problems with the drilling because I am blind in one eye so depth perception is impossible for me. The bit does like to sit in the pads though which is nice. I had a little struggle fitting the dip socket into the holes but a little pushing and pulling and it fit!.

I guess all in all it maybe took me an hour to make the board, not bad.

My costs where $5 for a big sheet of copper clad
$10 for etching solution
$5 for drill bits
and I hate to admit it because I am such a bachelor that I don't even own an iron, so I had to buy an Iron for $25 bucks.

I would appreciate any tips on drilling though. I saw a mini drill press at my parts store but it looked really crappy and was $50. My dremel won't go small enough to hold the drill bits.