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Merry Christmas guys and gals and all the best for 2015.

   

Felix

First off: this thing sound terrific. So many options, so many different shades of fuzz. Chapeau to everyone involved in making it happen.

Anyways, it took me forever to box this thing up. I tried 3 different kinds of paper, as well as printer settings and so on to make the toner transfer like I wanted it to be. I messed the transfer up more than once by ripping it off again when I removed the backing paper. The time I finally etched it (I think attempt #9), I just soaked the paper for 20 min in water and just removed what came of on its own.
I then etched with NaOH solution, it soaked right through the leftover paper. Anyways, I mixed up Cody's and Graham's tutorials for this one. I found that dipping the enclosure in and out of the solution as Cody is doing is was not as effective as applying the NaOH on the top.
I also had to reapply the black paint three times as I messed it up the first time when spraying it with clear coat and the second time I didn't wait long enough for the paint to dry. I found out the hard way that acrylic paint is not the best kind to be sanded of. It smears too much.
Anyways, it turned out awesome in the end (although I could've moved the pcb up and the 3PDT down a little). The graphics is inspired by the Scott Pilgrim comics, which I love and find very suiting for a dirt pedal. Also, Graham's similar pedal was very inspiring.

          

I'm looking for schematics for EQ type pedals like the Earthquaker Devices Tone job or similar ones. I prefer a simpler one over let's say the Boss GE-7 as I want to try designing the pcb myself and going for OSH park for the first time.
Any other suggestions for similar projects are very welcome!

I'll keep it short this time:
Madbean Current lover build stock. MN3007 version, IC by Keefe (lectric-fx). Sounds great

          

Just one more thing: looking for acronyms for mistress yields some very weird/disturbing results

Good evening folks,
this is my first 1590A build. Now that I finished, I want to do another 1590A. Really saves some space. But how some of you manage to put 4 pots in there is still a mystery to me. This board is rather small and the lumberg jacks aren't the big ones either, but it's really a challenge to do everything on such a close space.

I decided to not use any labels this time as it's only volume and the enclosure is a standard black Hammond one. Instead I used a big ass jewel (red 8mm LED under there) and a transparent chicken head. IMHO, it fits together really nice.

     

Here's another one finished on friday evening. This is my favorite build so far, despite some imperfections. It was a tight fit in a 1590B! I don't know where I got the idea from, but I've seen it before.. I added a transparent bottom plate and some LEDs on the side walls to make the pedal glow (always on, btw.). I added a little daughter board for the LDRs in the corner. The guts were really nice before I started adding all the LED stuff

Enclosure is etched with FeCl3 and toner transfer. You can see, it's still work in progress as the etchant worked its way through the mask...
I tried various Ge and Si diodes for the second clipping option but went with red LEDs in the end. Besides the nice tones, one reason was that I could bend them to the upper edge of the enclosure. This way, you can see them glow while playing, which I think is pretty cool
I have another Kingslayer in planning for a friend and I think I'll take a higher resistance pot for the volume. I never go over 10 o'clock with that one...
Hope you like it too. Cheers

     

     

Hey guys,
this is going to be a longer story - a story of failure with more or less success at the end. Just skip ahead for the pics

So, this build was primarily inspired by Jason's (jubal81) spectacular Brazen Bull build. I thought, I can do that too as I'm supposed to be an expert on this field since I'm a chemist. I had the idea to also use a wet chemical approach to copper plate the whole enclosure and then etch parts of it away to have a nice copper-aluminium contrast with a lot of bling bling considering the name of this project is Sparklehorn.

I first tried the copper plating with the enclosure's bottom lid. I used Copper sulfate (CuSO4) as a copper source and a Zink anode. The freshly polished aluminum enclosure was the cathode. Theory tells me, that Cu2+ ions will get reduced on the neg. pole and therefore plate the enclosure (Zn on the other hand oxidized to Zn2+ to go in solution). It worked mostly, after some trials I found that 5V are more than enough and the current produced sufficed to kill the fuse of a very cheap multimeter lying around. I also found that a low pH (approx. 2) was beneficial. I perfected the procedure to the part were I could have written something onto the enclosure in copper (very crude, but I could have) since the deposition was very local at the Zn anode's tip. So I spent about 7h moving the anode around to coat the enclosure "evenly".
It looked good enough, so I went ahead and tried toner transfer. I haven't used toner transfer before, so I also did some trial runs. One trial was photo paper. This one failed miserably... it stuck randomly to the enclosure so bad that I ripped part of the copper coating of the enclosure when removing the paper. This lead to another 3h of re-coating.
I then succeeded in transfer and started etching with FeCl3. Unfortunately, I didn't consider that Al is, of course, as it is a less precious metal, more prone to oxidation ergo dissolution. So, instead of only etching the Cu away, I also got a relief into the Al, which I didn't want and also the Al dulled as it is when etching Al. Furthermore, some of the Cu didn't dissolve due to preferential etching of the Al.
This is how it looked at that stage:



I thought, I'll just spray black and sand of the paint on the elevated parts to get a copper-black contrast, but of course it wasn't what I initially wanted and also it looked rather bad with parts of the copper - once more - lifting of the Al enclosure...
After sleeping over it, I went ahead and sanded the whole top down to bare aluminum again (took about 2h, since I the coarsest sanding paper I had, was 800grid paper) and applied a hastily designed decal with a copper-coloured background. I left the sides with the real copper plating though. Finishing touches with envirotex and I was done. Or so I thought.

During boxing, I had to take everything out, because I thought that I put the LEDs in in reverse, which I didn't so it was for nothing. Also, I accidentally centre-punched the bottom part of the enclosure instead of the top for the jacks. Putting the wires in was a pain as well, took me ages to finish. And of course it didn't work as planned. Luckily, it was just a very small solder bridge on the delay stomp, which I found very fast.
So, without further ado, I present the final product, which isn't at all, how I wanted it to be. I'm not really content with the decal, should have gone with black lettering for contrast or leave the black border off.
Thanks for reading this far

     

Hey guys,
finally finished that one, I was missing a small sized 2n7 cap...
I chose Pink Floyd's "the dark side of the moon" cover art for this one. It doesn't really relate to the pedal, but I always liked the cover. To make it a little more distinct, I merged the front and back covers. Sounds very good, but I can see why the original just had two switchable depth settings; there are a lot of strange sounds in between. Unfortunately, the printer screwed up more than one decal (no idea why), so I ended up using one with some splotches of missing black paint. In the one picture it looks really sparkly, which is a more than it looks in reality.
It was a tight fit in the 1590B, I had to use the Lumberg style jacks to make it work. Luckily, I had some designated for another project, so I switched them out.
Thanks to twin1965, who designed the pcb and sold it to me. Very nice layout!

     

Hey guys,

I just finished my Lovetone Meatball clone on Alanp's board. That one is just awesome. Lots and lots of various tones to get out of. Also very nice with a fuzz in the send-return loop. I wanted to build it in a blue enclosure, but RS didn't have it in blue.
I had no problems building this, although drilling was nerve-wrecking and I drilled a few holes slightly bigger than needed. Also, I didn't make a drill template for all the jacks, which turned out to be really stupid. I had to use two types of in-/out types, because the big one didn't fit and two of the switched jacks hardly fit next to each other.
I have a feeling that the filter-whore-syndrome is infectious.

Hey guys,
so I want to turn a crappy Behringer wah into a volume pedal. I just bought the thing in good condition for the shell. I also plan to imply a boost which is activated with a 3pdt when applying more pressure to the front end of the pedal. Now, I just ran into a few questions and would love your advice:

* Which pot would you use for the volume? I tend to go with a 500kA...
* The wah wah was fitted with a spring. Once removed, the upper part always falls to the front end. Obviously, I want it to stay in the position I set it to. Suggestions on how to achieve that?
* I'm still struggling to get the movable top removed from the rest. anyone knows how that is supposed to work?

thanks,
Felix

This is my finished Doppelgänger Doppelgänger
First off, hats off to Lacesensor and alanp for the board layout and all the work to make this happen. Secondly, put your hands together for all of the little helpers I had debugging the build after having weird oscillation and noise issues. Turns out I had the dry out touch the regular out despite insulating tape (there was a microscopic rip in the tape...).
Anyways, it sounds great now, although I haven't gotten around to fully testing it yet. This is one of the most complex builds on my list yet. Lots to learn from the build since there are lots and lots of board mounted parts to align (drilling was nerve wrecking despite test drilling on wood) and the amount of jacks included. Also, applying a decal of that size is not easy at all.
'Nough said, here's some pics:

Hey guys,
I'm looking for one of those huge LEDs/lights/bezels that orange is using. Here's a pick of Guybrush's valvetizer build were he used one. I wouldn't mind it being a little smaller tbh, but in the same kind of style. I've seen them here more than once, if I remember correctly.



I was looking at Tayda and musikding without finding anything...
Thanks!

hey guys,

I’ve ran into some problems with my doppelganger build. It’s working, but not completely how it’s supposed to. First of, I get quite a lot of gain when strumming a little harder. Both, on my strat and my LP, with humbuckers or without and it’s even there in spectral bypass.
The other problem is that at certain knob positions (affected by all of the knobs as it seems) I get these spacey synth-like oscillations. I was really careful when soldering all components, reheating all joints after soldering in and measured all resistors, so they should be good.
other details:
* I used B2k pots for HF and LF span
* all pots are from tayda 
* futurlec 2A LDRs as recommended
* shielded cable for the output (missing in the pic, otherwise this is the final state)
Because of the amount of necessary wiring for testing (all of them, basically) I didn’t rock before boxing.
Any input on where to start searching for the issue is appreciated!

Thanks!

This is the EHX Clone Theory Chorus build on of Haberdasher's marvelous Celeste Chorus boards. This was really a fun build and it sounds great. I can finally get rid off my crappy Behringer Chorus I got years ago.
I more or less used solid core wire for the first time here and I think it turned out pretty neat, but obviously I need more practice with it. Even with quite some time thinking about a drilling template, especially the distance from the side, I almost had a major mistake. The input jack just barely fits next to the pcb and had to be squeezed in. I was rather lucky there. Also, I was getting used to using Josh's 3PDT daughter boards so much that I automatically drilled the right hole 12mm. The intention was to have the switch on the left and the LED on the right side...
The cover is pretty much inspired by the name: Clone Theory made me think of clone wars from the Star Wars saga, so I went with that. I was pretty glad with the pic itself, but after finding the filters in Gimp and fooling around with them I think it turned out even better (some comic-, colour and shadefiltering, if I remember right). The second pic is most accurate to how it looks like in real life.

Thanks again to Haberdasher for this amazing board, as well as a tested and rather cheap MN3007!

Hey guys,

I'm planning on buying a volume pedal this week (it's been tremedously shitty so far concerning work, so I need a cheer-up and I always wanted one ).
Any recommendations in an affordable price range?

cheers

I know that this is kind of a taboo question, but I'll ask anyways.
I was waiting for the Dirtbag to be released in June, which got postponed for an even better version in late summer. I'm fine with that, but I also wanted to buy the new sparkle horn that was supposed to be released in June as well.

So the question at hand is when the projects marked to be released in June will be released and also those marked July.
I know you're probably busy as hell Brian, but I'm just an impatient bastard and couldn't hold this question back any longer. I'm sure there are others here checking the project page on a daily basis as well hoping to see those beauties stocked.

And another one down. This one was waiting for the right knobs for a few weeks as well.
I designed the switching for the stomps myself. It was easy enough, but still it's my first genuinely self-designed "circuit", I'm kind of proud that it works flawlessly. It's designed so that the white LEDs always indicate which effect is engaged - also in bypass mode. Since I wanted it to be switchable by foot, I went with a 1590B and circumvent my first 1590A build. It was a PITA to get all the non-pcb-mounted switches in there with all the wires, so I can't even imagine how Dave managed to get it into a 1590A that clean: http://www.madbeanpedals.com/forum/index.php?topic=12068.msg117311#msg117311

It's my first Fuzz project and also my first SMD attempt. Great project and great tones! I soldered it with the hot air method using a standard heatgun. Besides one resistor flowing off and was hence never ever seen again, everything went surprisingly smooth and it was really rewarding and fun to see when the parts align themselves when the solder paste melts.

The only minor flaw is that I accidentally drilled a little to deep with the stepper bit on the left LED bezel so it is a little lower than the right. Nevermind, though.The cover design is in line with my first builds (quantum overdrive, delay and octaver). Enough said:





     

Finally! I managed to finish CJ's DuoVibe after all those month. Actually, I built it in January, but it didn't work and was sitting around waiting to be picked up and debugged for quite a while. I have no clue why it didn't work in the first place since it worked prior to boxing and all the connections checked out. After fiddeling around, I found that loosening the pot screw just a little made the interior LED flash again. So I moved it up from the pcb just a little to align it a little better and it worked. After that, I was waiting for proper knobs for a few weeks. Long story short: they arrived today and it looks sweet! Cover is random as the last one
I think the LDRs/LED I used where not optimal, since the LED is nearly invisble before 12 o' clock and the effect is rather subtle even when cranked up. I still like it, though I think I won't use it to often.

          

Hey guys,
last weekend I was at the flea market at my local music equipment shop. They had very good, but cheap guitars as well as some pedals and mixing equipment. I didn't need any of it, but it was hard not to buy something just for the heck of it.
When I was browsing through the regular shop though, I found these little fellas. For all the 1590A geniuses on the forum: this is what you have to aim for!



These HoTone pedals are only 74x44x44 mm. I love that they all have one knob at the backside, which is LED lighted when the pedal is engaged. The small roll bar so not to destroy when stomping with bigger feet, is also a very cute feature

The have quite a few different ones: overdrives, distortion, fuzz, chorus, reverb, octaver, delay, tremolo, bosster, compressor, a looper and even a tuner!

I haven't found a gut shot yet, but these have to have smaller pots than 9mm... every pedal generally has 3 pots and one knob. I wonder how the cram all the stuff in there. Obviously it has to be SMD and the stomp has to be a non-standard one, since it's party above the output jack. Impressive design work, if you ask me.

[turned out bubble free, even in thickness and glass clear!]

With all the questions about how to do Envirotex (henceforth abbreviated: ET) right, I thought we could probably just write our own experiences down to extract the ultimate formula to help us and future generations

First off, I need to give big thanks to Juansolo and Cleggy, who did an amazing ET tutorial, which can be found here. The first time, I did everything following their instructions and it turned out really good for a first attempt.

After some more recent trials, I found the following aspects to be very important/noteworthy.

* One of the most important things is of course measuring and mixing. As I have access to plenty of syringes, I use 5ml ones to dose the epoxy prepolymer and the amine hardener. Use seperate syringes to dose them, as you don't want to have one of the components in the other storage container. Syringes are readily available at pharmacies and should be very cheap.

* The mixing can be done by hand, which is tedious. Again, I have access to a magnetic stirrer in the lab, which gives me about 15 seconds of stirring for a well mixed, ready to pour mixture. In the DIY spirit, a friend of mine build a simple version of a magnetic stirrer when he was 15. I found this tutorial which is basically the same thing. Might be worth doing, if you do lots of ET and or just for the fun.

* Preheating the components is also key to a good result as it makes it way easier to mix the components and to spread it on the enclosure. On the down side, heating the hardener (the bottle with the black cap) leads to a yellowish colouring of the compound. Chemically speaking, this is totally normal, as the hardener is an amine which gets oxidised under air when heated. Until now, my coatings came out crystal clear nevertheless, but the hardener only has a light yellow touch by now and is "thinned" by mixing with the second part. I still stopped heating the hardener to prevent further oxidation, just to be safe. Also, storing it in the dark will minimise the oxidation process. (sorry for the chemical excourse)

* Getting the coating bubble free is the hardest of all parts. Bursting all the bubbles will require tedious observation of the enclosure (every 10 min or so) as the bubbles form over time. Once the resin hardens, you can't remove them anymore (or fill them with more ET without seeing it). To pop the bubbles you can either exhale on them or use a blow torch/brulée burner as stated in the instructions. Both methods work pretty fine, but won't help once the ET is on the more viscous side. Warming the whole thing again with a heat gun/hair dryer only works in the first phase of drying; at some point the whole thing won't flow any more.

* Mixing the ET under vacuum conditions to prevent air getting trapped while stirring does not lead to fewer bubbles

* I just lately found that curing ET in an oven at 70 °C takes about 1-2 hours to harden it sufficiently that there will be no more bubbles forming afterwards (you can't make a dent with your finger afterwards, but it still feels a little soft). The two coatings I did that way turned out bubble free, even in thickness and glass clear! I guess, existing bubbles burst because of the low viscosity at elevated temperatures which also allows the ET to fill the left holes. Maybe (but just maybe), it also degases earlier since gas storage capacity of liquids decreases with increasing temperature, thus degassing in an early curing stage. Science for the win, bitches!

* A 1590B enclosure takes about 5 ml of ET (2.5 ml of each component) to cover it. Thicker coatings will obviously need more. There is a tool to calculate the needed amount on the suppliers homepage.


Please add your experiences, tipps and tricks! ET gives every enclosure the extra sparcle it deserves, but it is tricky to get it just the way you want it. Again: thumbs up for juansolo and cleggy's tutorial.