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Here's my latest build - a 1776 Effects Rub-a-Dub Reverb!



I've had this circuit built for a while, but only just boxed it up this week. My 5 year old boy did the artwork for it, and I love how it came out! Acryclic paints over a black powdercoated enclosure, clear coated with some Minwax water based polyurethane. Hopefully one day he can be rocking it, since he's already super into my guitars (and I have a Loog waiting for his birthday next week).

Great sounding simple little reverb, perfect for my little practice amp that doesn't have any on board!

I built a Doombutter (Mid-Fi Clarinot) a few years back but didn't really put any effort into the enclosure. I found it tough remembering what the controls did without labels so I sold it and decided to build another with an etched enclosure this time. Both times I used Haberdasher's awesome etch of the Doombutter (thanks Keefe!).

I went with a worn-out looking etch to match the vibe of the circuit.

Such a fun circuit, and very musical and usable at the less-than-crazy settings!

I recently got a friend of mine into building, and he purchased a Woodstork and Mimik to get started with. Somehow we missed out the 15n caps for the Mimik on the parts order, but I have a handful of 10n caps; would these work for C5, C12, and C15 in the Mimik, or does he need to put in a new order for the 15n caps?

Thanks!

I went on a total spree (for me) last year and built a load of pedals while I was a stay-at-home dad for our first kiddo. He's 18 months now, and I recently went back to work as a helicopter pilot/instructor. The company was interested in branching out intro drones, for aerial photography/video to start with, and since I used to fly RC helicopters from when I was about 12 to 19 years old, I was interested in heading it up. So here's my latest build!



It took a good few months to research, source, and then assemble all the various components, because this is about as far from a Best Buy drone as you could get. It's about 3.5 ft diameter and about 2 feet tall, weighing in around 20lbs.

We are currently waiting on our FAA approval to operate it commercially, so we're limited to test flying it right now, but it's flown about 5 drama-free hours so far and is doing well!

My friend actually designs and builds the camera gimbal mounted underneath, and this is serial # 0001 of this model gimbal, so we're acting as kind of a guinea pig for him to see if any design changes are needed, but it does a remarkable job of keeping the camera steady and level regardless of what the drone is doing above.

Anyway I just wanted to thank everyone here for everything I've learned from you all. There's no way I would have been able to put this thing together without the primer into electronics that guitar pedals gave me, and you all helped in that even if you didn't know it!

Any other drone operators on the board?

I'm just finishing up a Light wah build (external LDR for manual sweep and an LFO mode) and while it's a cool sounding pedal, I'm realizing that an envelope mode might be more practical on (dark) stages than the external LDR. Is there a DIY project floating around that has a good sounding envelope filter with an LFO mode too?

New Sibling Pedal Refinish Day!

This is an old BYOC Envelope Filter I've had for years. It was probably the third BYOC pedal I built before I found out about Madbean and vero

It originally had a mediocre swirl paint job with waterslide decal and a mediocre clear coat and didn't look very good really. I also never used the fixed wah portion of the circuit, so I decided to whip that out, fill the holes, and refinish it.

I sent it off to FSU to my artsy sister and said she could do whatever she wanted with it, and this is what I got back!




I love it! It's so totally different to anything I would think up or be able to do. I have a lot of respect for anyone who can do this stuff.

No gut shot because I forgot!

If I wanted to build a two-in-one with one circuit operating on +9v and the other on either 15 or 18v from the Road Rage, would I power the 9v circuit straight from the DC jack with the Road Rage in parallel, or use the 9v pads from the Road Rage?

Also, when the Road Rage doc says it gives 18v unregulated, what does that mean and how does it impact a pedal running on that?

Thanks!

New Old Guitar (Re)finish Day! A pic before the story:



My Dad gave me this guitar 10 years ago for my 18th birthday. It's a 1966 Burns/Baldwin Marvin. He had it from the mid 70's I think.

It has been refinished before but it developed a crack around the neck pocket in the really thin part of the wood, so my Dad repaired it and refinished it again. He owns Spectrum Guitar Finishes (www.spectrumguitarfinishes.co.uk) so a lot of my guitars have been finished by him

Anyway it has been apart for almost a year because right when I sent the body off to him (he lives in Spain), he was diagnosed with cancer and needed surgery and chemo so was out of action for quite a while. He's feeling better these days so got back to work recently, and when I went to go visit him at the beginning of this month, he had finished it all ready for me to bring back. I got it all put back together over the weekend.

This guitar has quite a history to it - my Dad used everything from it but the body/pickguard in a left handed version he had made as he loved the neck so much. He gigged it for years that way. Then he put it back together, and the rhythm player in his band used it in their Shadows cover band for quite a while. They recorded some of the tunes back in the 90's using this guitar, and shortly after recording, the rhythm guitarist, a very good friend of my Dad's, was killed in a motorcycle accident. The guitar then wasn't used for years and sat in it's case until I decided I'd like to learn to play, and since it was the only right handed guitar in the house, it was the one my Dad started teaching me on before I got my own. Then a few years later he surprised me with it for my 18th birthday.

It's a fantastic sounding guitar - Strat like but bigger sounding with more bite. It's a very special guitar to me and I'm just really happy to have it back together again

I had a 125B drilled for one knob sitting around, so a while back I started a thread asking everyone's favorite one-knob pedals, or pedals that could be good as one-knob versions with some trimmers inside. I like simplicity

I got loads of great suggestions, but the one I went with in the end was Hogharry's suggestion of a Magnavibe with a trimmer for the depth (this is the other one - Thanks TreeSlayer ), and the single outside knob being speed. I built it from the Tagboard Effects layout, and it fired up first time! Some pics:



I always like to try to do things I haven't before, so a couple of firsts for this one:
- First vero build!
- First time using a trimmer for a normally external control
- First time alcohol inks went on and stayed on successfully 

The last time I tried the alcohol inks, I used purple, and the mod podge turned it into a nasty burgundy color. I did it again and just used polycrylic, and it just didn't last. This time, since the colors were greens and blues, the mod podge didn't affect the colors negatively. I then finished it with rattle can polyurethane which can also amber colors, but again it's not noticeable.

I need to find a better LDR because the one in there currently doesn't have a high enough dark resistance, so the effect is still quite subtle even with the depth maxed. I socketed the LED and LDR though and it's easy to get to so I'll try some others at a later date.

One last thing - is it ok to ground the pot like that? I didn't want to run another wire round if I could avoid it, so I just soldered a jumper to the pot case. It seems to work fine, but I just wondered if there was a reason you shouldn't do that?

So I built this one a while ago omitting the Nom switch so as to leave it in 'Script' mode the whole time. I did an alcohol ink finish which just didn't hold up to gigging (I don't think I did a good job finishing it to be honest though, I had lots of problems with it). I decided I'd refinish it, and while I was at it, decided to add the Nom switch.

I thought I'd try my hand at etching because I hate that newly-finished-pedal-don't-want-to-gig-it feeling. I started over with a blank enclosure and used a tutorial I found here, although I can't remember who by. The one in the example is the 'Subtlety Drive'. Anyway it was an excellent tutorial and worked great (using photo paper) once I got the paper off. I had to do 4 attempts though because every time I tried to remove the paper, loads of the toner flaked off. I finally realized I didn't think I was getting the box hot enough for long enough so I fixed that and it worked much better.

This was also my first time starting with a totally blank enclosure and drilling everything. Took the advice I saw here repeatedly and purchased some step bits, and was surprised at how much of a non-event it was even using a hand drill.

Special thanks to TreeSlayer for the trimpot that somehow evaded me on my order!

Here are some pics:

So Reverb put this on Facebook, mentioning the color changing crystal ball. I had to check it out. In the video at first it's just an amber color with some blue/purple thrown in responding to his playing, so I thought the amber light was always on and it just added another LED or something, but then a bit later the amber goes out completely and it's all blues and purples. How did they make that happen? It's a trip.

https://reverb.com/item/530430-svisound-ge-fuzz-v-3-2-art-edition

I have a populated NomNom, and was thinking of knocking together this Magnavibe: http://tagboardeffects.blogspot.com/2012/01/bigfoot-fx-magnavibe.html

I thought they might be cool sharing an enclosure (vibrato into phaser maybe?) but I didn't know if there was anything glaringly obvious that would make this a bad idea? I'm not well versed in the rules or things to avoid with two-in-ones to make sure there's no weird noise or problems. I thought I'd ask you far more knowledgeable chaps!

Thanks!

So browsing the forum, I've just realized I need to build a Stage Fright (don't you hate/love when that happens?) 

Quick question: does the rate LED turn off with the effect if you build it in the stock configuration, or does it keep blinking even when it's bypassed?

I was looking to build the Rub a Dub reverb and thought it would be cool to add something like a Smoothie to just the wet signal of the reverb on a switch so it could be bypassed. I thought it might be a cool effect to have phased reverb but the direct signal be intact and unphased (ha).

I asked Josh and he said he thought there would be an impedance mismatch and that it probably wouldn't work right without an opamp for buffering. I'm still a relative n00b, so would this be possible? More trouble than it's worth? I appreciate any ideas from you guys on how to make this work if it can be done

When I stumbled upon Haberdasher's discontinued PCB thread, I recognized almost all of them except the Doombutter. I didn't even know what the MidFi Clari(not) which is it based on was, so I promptly jumped on YouTube to check it out and fell in love with the weirdness. Totally bizarre glitchy delay vibrato fuzz combo that is supposed to simulate a broken/failing tape echo. Here it is!



A few firsts for me in this build:
- First time building a pedal NOT on a labelled PCB, but on Haberdasher's awesome etch. It showed up amazingly clean and perfect!
- First time using an LED/LDR combo
- First time drilling any holes in an enclosure (this was an old BYOC enclosure I had laying around, just needed to add a pot and LED hole)
- First time distressing a pedal.

I didn't intend to distress it originally. I finished it in flat black, and it looked perfect, but as I was trying to add a tiny drop of super glue to hold the LED in place, something went wrong and it went all over the face of the pedal. I didn't want to start over so I just decided to make this one look beat up. But then I thought it kinda fits the name I had decided on *and* the theme of this pedal, and so I'm actually glad it happened now.

Overall I love the sound of this. I did the 'fuzz lift' mod which I 100% recommend. I was expecting a bit of a one-trick-pony and that it would be fun to make stupid broken tape sounds, but I've managed to get some incredibly useful tones out of it, like a Beatles-esque ADT setting, and almost a glitchy chorus sound as well as straight up single-repeat modulated delay.

Thanks again to Keefe for an awesome etch!

I have an MI Audio Crunchbox which I quite like, although it is absolutely terrible at responding to you rolling your guitar knob down - it just turns to indiscernible mud.

Can you knowledgeable folk suggest some similar pedals I could build that perhaps clean up a little better when rolling the volume down? Really looking for that kind of mid to high gain Marshally crunch.

FWIW I mainly use a '65 DRRI.

Thanks!

So I had the parts waiting for a really long time for the Nom Nom to be restocked, and when it was I jumped on it immediately! On to the pics...




This was my first attempt with alcohol inks. Everyone said how easy they were, but to be honest I had quite a bit of trouble with them. I wanted to do this purple color, but when giving it the coat or two of Mod Podge that everyone recommends, it lifted some of the purple color (even though it had been on there for days) and when it dried, gave it a sort of yellowy burgundy look as opposed to the nice purple that was on there originally. I stripped that off and tried just going straight on with polycrylic over the alcohol ink, which worked fine for the baseplate and the pedal face, but it again lifted the alcohol ink on the sides and it all ran down. On the third attempt I decided to (kinda cop-out) leave the sides bare metal, and polycrylic straight over the alcohol ink on the top. I polished up the sides a little to make it look a bit more finished. I actually quite like the silver and purple look.

And yes I know that's a weird looking LED surround. When I was soldering the LED in place, I guess the heat from the iron changed the color of the ink on the outside of the enclosure to a kind of brown. I was very annoyed after everything else. So I just rounded up some washers and that nut to cover it haha. Looks weird but it works I guess.

I had a problem with the LED not working, but found it was just a small solder bridge on the PCB. Works fine and sounds amazing now!

Here is what the Mod Podge did to the purple (I left it on the baseplate since no one sees it).

I have just finished building the new NomNom, rocked it before boxing it with the JMK style test box (without the LED hooked up) and all was fine, but the LED isn't working now that I hooked it up with the whole enclosure.

Before I go about troubleshooting for an error I wanted to make sure I understood the build doc correctly. If you want an always-on LED, do you omit R29 and leave the LS pad empty, and hook it up as per the diagram in the doc? It reads that way but I wanted to check.

Thanks!

So I kind of like the idea of one-knob pedals. I know about one-knob fuzzes and boosters, but I was thinking of trying something a little different that might work unexpectedly well with just one knob. Anyone have any suggestions of some one knob designs, or circuits that work well having some of the controls fixed with a trimpot inside leaving just one on the outside?

I'm about to build a NomNom when Brian gets them back in stock, so I'm covered on the phaser front probably.

I was looking at doing the Zero Point Micro build at some point, and was just curious as to whether there is much of a difference in sound to the MXR Carbon Copy, which is currently the only delay I own (and love).

I think I saw somewhere that the Carbon Copy doesn't feature the PT2399, so I'm guessing it might sound a little different?

Thanks!