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...has a shotgun!

P19 on a Mudbunny board, thanks to juansolo for providing the list of parts. Straightforward build, worked first time, sounded good, then I got to the enclosure. As a longtime Floyd/Gilmour fan I was headed towards the  obvious flying pig graphic when I remembered this little chap. It all went well and it was only when I started drilling through the Envirotex that I spotted my error. When I was laying out the decal in Inkscape I had put red dots at the centres of the holes, which was fine for the ones being drilled but I was planning to leave the Envirotex over the LED. I couldn't leave the dot there because it was too obvious, so I decided to drill it through. As I pushed the bulbous red LED through the hole I realised that I had aligned the LED perfectly with Mr Piggy's groin! Switching it on made matters a lot worse. I tried a green LED, thinking it would be less obvious but it just made him look radioactive (oddly appropriate as the Pig Cops are supposedly mutated human LAPD officers).

In the end I decided to strip the Envirotex off and start again. This was easier that I expected as the Envirotex is only on the top of the enclosure, so it is mostly stuck to the decal rather than the metal. The decal is a self adhesive sticker and by levering it away from the enclosure I could remove the decal and Envirotex together. This just left a little bit of Envirotex around the edge to remove with a sharp knife and some light sanding. I adjusted the graphic a little to be on the safe side, but I kept the green LED as it seemed appropriate somehow.

Straightforward Wolfshirt build resulting in lots of octavial fuzzy goodness. I recoloured the fox photo blue in Photoshop. I don't know why but I just had to do it. 

Krank Distortus Maximus on Vero. I really like this one, something about the tone reminds me of a 1980s Marshall that I used to own. I used IvIark's layout, with additional mid cut and hi cut switches based on ideas from the Tagboard blog. A classic case of me over complicating something that works fine in the first place. There appear to be similarities between this circuit and the Purple Plexi 800, which has a single tone control instead of the TMB stack and therefore less off board wiring.

Why a giant tortoise? Well, let's say that the visual puns may have hit an all time low...

GuitarPCB Mastadon that I built for my son's mate who is a bass player and a massive Muse fan to the point of having a MUSE tattoo. We dialled in the pinch and away he went...

Triple Wreck clone that I built as a Christmas present for my son. It's a great sounding distortion with very effective tone controls. The PCB allows you to build it with the stock boost, no boost or a separate boost of your choice. I started with the stock boost, which has a fixed gain and the pot sweeps from an OD style tone to a fuzz. Sounded horrible to me, so I swapped it out for the LPB attached to the pot, which works very nicely. There's a Road Rage tucked under the main board pumping the distortion side up to 18V.

My son's 22nd birthday yesterday, so he thought he would buy himself a present. He's a massive Avenged Sevenfold/Synyster Gates fan and decided he needed another Schecter Synyster Custom S (he already has a White one with black stripes and a black Custom with Silver stripes). S is for Sustainiac.



...and that would have been the end of the story. We'd had some difficulty getting one in time and had to cancel the original order. Just after we committed to buying one from another dealer the manager of the original dealer emailed to say they felt bad about letting us down and offering to sell us one hanging on his office wall. THE ONE SIGNED BY ALL THE BAND MEMBERS! It would have been rude to decline such a kind offer, so my credit card got whacked for another Schecter and a promise of repayment in the new year.

I'm building a 2 in 1 pedal and I want to put a tuner out/mute footswitch before he first effect. Any advice on how to best go about it?

Possibly the most stressful birthday present ever. I'd recently built my first guitar and my son Dave decided that he wanted one for his birthday. No pressure then. I involved him in the decision making but he didn't see the guitar until he opened the case on his birthday. Mahogany body, mahogany neck and Alnico 8 (yes 8!) high output pickups hand-wound by Ash at Oil City Pickups with coil splits via push-push pots. The finish is a custom colour from Wudtone. I was worried because I expected it to end up a stronger red but it turned out it was exactly what Dave has in mind, so he was very happy. I think of it as the Metalcaster, but he calls it the "Dave Custom". It sounds amazingly good.

I should have posted this a long time ago but maybe I will catch up with myself soon! This one's a straight build of a GuitarPCB D'Lay that I built as a 21st birthday present for my son Dave. The background image is another simulated bit of physics generated by some of his computer programming. According to him it's the probability density of a hydrogen atom. I'm not one to argue but it looks like a blue doughnut to me.



This is the first time I've written on a pedal in binary! He loves it, which is the main thing.

Pork Barrel with added level control. A couple of years ago I started a tradition of building pedals for my son an Christmas and birthday gifts and this was one of his requests. He is currently studying for his Master's Degree in Theoretical Physics. The abstract looking graphic is in fact the output of a programme that he wrote in a computer language called Python. He says it's "a simulation of the diffraction of light through a Gaussian aperture." Fair enough. I just thought it looked nice. The top is finished with Envitotex - Marauder style.