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This topic has already become "famous". If you do searches for anything having to do with a 1996 MXR M117 flanger on Google, the AI machine has already lifted several key pieces of information directly from my post, in some cases word for word. It's happened! As individuals we now have the ability to control the information shared with the entire world on various subjects. Maybe in the near future AI will tell us that 2+2 = 5. If enough blogs were to convincingly promote it, then it will happen!

"When you control the mail, you control...information!"
                                      ~ Newman

So what's the gist of this circuit?  Two delays running in parallel hoping for differences in components (piggy backed)?

Without a schematic it's difficult to know what configuration they're running. It's odd that newer versions of the M117 look like they use a single MN3204. For whatever reason, they've never gone the MN3007 route, despite the fact the originals were running serial configuration and MN3007s are readily available. I guess BBDs are more than just stages and clock speed. There's something else going on that affects the final output.

[two MN3004's]

There are so many versions of the MXR M117, it's not surprising there is one version that has pretty much flown under the radar for the last couple decades. Yes, there are people who know the version I'm talking about, but for the most part, it's still kind of a sleeper. Clear back in 1996, MXR made it's first reissue of the M117. There doesn't seem to be much information about that first reissue on the Internet. It appears they may have only been made for about 2 years. The majority of online demos for the M117 are of the originals or the "newer" reissues. A gut shot is nearly impossible to find of the 1996 version.
The '96 version was US-made and used good-ol through-hole components and a very interesting choice for the BBD:  not one, but two MN3004's! In the world of flangers, that makes it much more rare than the SAD1024-based M117's. I don't think there is another flanger in existence that uses two MN3004's. This version also has two independent clock circuits as well, so it's easily the most complex version of the M117 MXR has ever made. A schematic would be awesome to check out, but is impossible to find.

So how do you spot one of these "post-vintage, yet vintage" versions? The easiest way is if there is a picture of the bottom plate. MXR didn't provide any battery power option in '96, so no battery doors.
If there isn't a picture of the bottom though, you can spot them by the paint. The first reissues were always a matte rough-finish gray color with no metal flake. So if it has metal flake charcoal paint, it's not the one.
The other odd identifying mark is the LED. On the '96 versions, the LED is one of the strangest colors of red I've ever seen for an LED. It's like watermelon Kool-Aid red when it's off. You can easily see the color difference when compared with the 2004-present versions.
So here are the pics:


The insides of these rarely see the light of day...

Dual MN3004's are under them pots...


Why did I bother posting any of this? I've still seen this rare version listed as "2004-present", and it generally get's lumped in with the newer ones that just aren't quite the same. So keep an eye out! You can still pick these up for pretty cheap considering how nice they are and how rare the BBDs are. You will never regret getting a hold of one of these early reissues. Highly recommended.
Happy hunting!

What are people thinking about the latest Big Muff out there ?

Personally I think this falls under the YABM category. There is hardly a sound this thing can make that I can't get out of that classic "overdrive into big muff" combination.
It's great that we already have the option to build one ourselves though.

I didn't even know that existed. Very nice.

Unfortunately, the soundclips and a lot of the gut shot pictures were never archived from PedalArea. I remember that was one of the best sites for figuring out if a Flanger had a unique BBD in it, rather than the typical MN3x07. Surprisingly there were quite a few that used oddballs like MN3204's and MN3009's. I still keep on the lookout for some of those, but they seem to have disappeared from any sites like Reverb or Ebay (probably because they actually sound good).

[visitors will opt in to your e-newsletters]

Selling email addresses can be quite profitable. What better way to get people to willingly send a bunch of them to you!
How to Monetize, Rent, or Sell Email Addresses
Just within reading the first few sentences of that site you come across this gem:
"If you have good content, getting email addresses will be relatively easy; visitors will opt in to your e-newsletters, or hand over their contact information in exchange for access to some unique piece of content or tool."
Does it say anywhere on that BYOC placeholder page that they won't sell your email address?
Nope. It's probably not even the same people who own the name anymore.

Sad to go back and see a lot of names that have dropped out of pedal sites.

And sad to see the sites that have also dropped out of existence. Sometimes you can find them on the way back machine, but they're usually just shells of thier former glory. I think around 2010-2016 were the glory years for guitar pedal sites. And Andy Martin was with ProGuitar shop back then too. PedalArea was a good one:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150220015131/http://www.pedalarea.com/

Heres mine....
How would you approach that?!

"I would be interested in a pedal featuring:

My first question would be:  what possible situation did this individual find themselves in where this pedal idea was the solution?
"you know it would be great if I could take the sound system of an aircraft carrier and run it through 30 phasers into a vintage Cray 1 computer and then output half of that into an old artari 2600 and the other half into Yankee stadium's P/A, while also having a tuner out for my sitar."

I'd say being a source of "truth" might be a slightly more rational interpretation

Maybe it's just a means for them to flex at dinner parties? "Check out how many websites I've made! Great success!"
I don't know.

Being right about AI doesn't seem like a victory, does it?

I don't know where that quote came from, but it's a good one. It reminds me of that scene in Hunt for Red October where the weapons officer refused to launch a torpedo that didn't have any safeties enabled. Of course, the idiot captain launched the torpedo anyway, and it eventually came back on them and blew them up. The weapons officer was proven correct, but he still died. A victory? Well, for about 1.2 seconds.

Revive the soapbox!
I'm sick and tired of those brainless websites that flood the Internet with ChatGPT-generated content.
"Are you looking for the guitar related tone source? Let's talk about the potentiometer shaft!"
Idiotic phrasing like that gives these sites away, in addition to thier 34 IQ information and stupid web address names. This garbage should be cleaned up / banned / relegated somehow. The real question is:  what possible purpose or advantage does somebody recieve from making these sites? It just clogs up being able to find the 5% of actual relative sites.

I forgot to mention I ended up with a tiny 15pf cap for C23 in the Collosalus, so the value of that cap can be all over the map. Definitely socket it and try many different ones!
I also found a great mod for the manual control:  solder a 10K resistor across the middle lug to the ground lug of the 50K potentiometer. This gives it much more precise control over the sweep, without affecting the behavior at all on the extreme ends of the rotation. I can get usable effect change all the way to about 2:00 on the rotation now, whereas before it would do nothing past around 9:00. I believe this mod simply mimics an audio taper pot, but it's way easier to implement this than take the pedal apart and change out the whole pot.

I've had a couple Madbean boards sitting around for a while, and I've finally had some time to complete them.
First off is a 2022 Collosalus. All I can say is, this was a collosal pain to get dialed in, because of my own choice to go way off the marked trail. I decided to try to follow the original pedal as closely as possible, so I got an old schematic and made the appropriate additions/subtractions. I had some old 1458's and 4558's to spare, so it seemed like a good idea. I also used different transistors just to make it hard on myself. In the end, I had a pedal that "worked", but didn't sound anything like I wanted. Ultimately, I had to make tons of mods to the bias control and the clock circuit. I found that Q5 & Q3 are very critical to the overall sound, and should be closely matched to get it to sound right. I also found a very interesting quirk to the biasing of the MN3007. There seems to be two settings of "correct" operation with the MN3007 in this circuit, and they're basically 90 degrees apart from each other on the bias control. I used the bias circuit on the Wizard schematic from 2009 you can find for the MXR117. At one bias setting, the pedal is very mid-80's rubber band metallic sounding, just like all those flangers people hate. But 90 degrees from that bias setting, suddenly it becomes a liquidy Andy Summers chorus machine, which is very good!
One thing I've noticed is that the Manual control really should be a logarithmic pot. The majority of the control is bunched up in the first 1/4 turn of the pot, and then you get about nothing from noon on. This also happens on my original Ross flanger (which is just an MXR117 with 4558's), so it's a common issue with this circuit.


The next one is the covid-era Rabbit Hole 2020.
My first intention was to build and ELK Sustainer with this, since I was always curious as to how that compared with a regular Big Muff.
I didn't like it. The tone control is just too weird. So I decided to try putting the tone control back to the normal cap value. That was a little better, but it still didn't sound great. So I decided to try swapping out the transistors. I had some random transistors that were in a CD case of all places, and it turns out, they just happened to be old BC239's that had the same markings as ones from mid 70's Rams Head big muffs. I adjusted one resistor in the the tone stack and one capacitor in the clipping stage to match the '75 Rams Head muff and BOOM! A killer-sounding Big Muff was born. This thing rips. Run some mild overdrive into the front end, and it sounds epic. I housed all of it in an old enclosure I had used for a DOD 250 clone, and I used random knobs and slapped a Thomas organ logo on it. All the wear and tear on the enclosure is from real use, so it isn't a relic job. It's now one of my favorite dirt pedals I've ever made. Funny how that happens.

I wasnt planning to do so. Im not sure there would be demand anyway.

I believe you have underestimated the sneakiness...

The microsynth fuzz sound is right up there with the Big Muff and the Fuzztain, because we're all trying to sound like Hummer anyway...

That looks great! Did you use an LM13700 for the OTA? I tried breadboarding this circuit years ago, but never really got a consistent sound out of it. Would love to hear a sound clip.

LOL, there are going to be some weird pieces of pie information on AI-generated DIY surfboards. Political activist Tubescreamer relay bypass, inserted Klon hair piece at the key buffer input. White house rally trumps the audio taper output pot while connecting pin 3 to active shooter tone controls.
Remove resistors R3, R24, and R31 and replace them with jumpers to activate the Ukraine edition transparent overdrive CE-1 mod.
Taylor Swift.