Messages

Oh damn, I can't say I'm surprised, but I am gonna miss it for those moments when you open up a box of parts and realize you forgot one or two things. Oh well, back to using Mouser it is, no sense dealing with their headache-inducing interface if there's no good reason for it...

Has anyone else noticed that Mammoth Electronics now has a minimum order quantity of 10 on their 125B enclosures? I've ordered from them several times before and always liked them for their selection of colors and reasonable pricing (even if they can be a bit sketchy when it comes to ordering other components), but if this is their new policy I'm gonna have to look elsewhere for my powder coating needs, as I don't build nearly enough pedals at this time to justify ordering 10 of any one color of enclosure. Does anyone else have any insight on this?

My biggest beef was dispatching the night king halfway through. I liked the battle of winterfell, and even how it ended, but I always thought the series was being set up as the fight for the iron throne is sort of an ongoing humans will be humans thing, but this army of ice zombies is the real threat. Like the magical fantasy aspect of the show was lesser to the political side. Made Bran and Jon and the Wall's interesting stories seem more like a side quest. Did Bran really become the three eyed raven, become humanities history book and see through time, just so he could rule a kingdom for a few decades? Seems like that could have been larger than that. But it is what it is! Entertainment.

Besides that, I don't think Danny's character turn was bad, I'm glad Jon wasn't just handed the throne, but the outrage is ludicrous. I can understand not enjoying the direction things took or the pacing of the last couple seasons, because I had my issues with them too, but to start a petition for a rewrite of the last season with new writers? Whiny, entitled crybabies.

I don't think that anybody really expects HBO to actually remake the last season, it's more just a way for people to voice their displeasure with the way things have gone and hopefully make Disney think twice about giving the showrunners their own Star Wars trilogy.

Excellent work! It's incredibly cleanly done and I love the graphics/color scheme! Did you pick this up recently or did you have the board laying around? I went to check out Apetone FX's website after the last Cascadia build was posted (and again just now) to pick one up and it says they're out of stock and it won't let me register to get on the wait list.

I'm deeply disappointed. The writing has been going downhill ever since they ran out of book material, but this season it just feels like it fell off a cliff. The entire season felt rushed and forced, characters that were supposed to be intelligent made nonsensical decisions again and again for completely contrived reasons, and they threw 7 seasons of narrative buildup and character development out the window for a few cheap twists. It's a damn shame too, because the acting and production were probably the best they've ever been and I feel bad for the cast and crew for pouring their hearts and souls into it when the writers/showrunners were clearly just phoning it in so they can move on to destroying Star Wars.

The story in FNV is so good and compelling... I tried to get back into FO3, but after it crashed my be-bothered-ness got up and went. Obsidian's KOTOR game was just as compelling, for me.

As for which faction to support? Mr House, I think. Everyone else is like, we're hanging on, we're surviving, let's get past this... while Mr House is the only one with an actual goal, vision, and a solid plan to get there.

I tend to gravitate towards Yes Man. No gods, no masters! I do help the NCR out without actually siding with them, as their citizens' hearts are in the right place, but their endemic corruption and imperialistic tendencies need to be curbed if they are to succeed as a nation, and I feel like being denied the Mojave without being utterly destroyed is the right kick in the pants they need to turn inwards and reexamine their priorities as a nation. As for Mr. House, sure he talks a big game, but looking at the state of every part of New Vegas that's not the strip shows you where his priorities really lie. In the end,  he's just another egotistical jackass who fancies himself a god (even if he denies it, his attitude says it all) when he's really just a shriveled abomination in a tube who should have died with the rest of the old world. I take a special pleasure in caving in his head with a golf club after pulling him out of his stasis chamber to remind him that he is just a man after all, and all men must die (plus, I love the Bioshock reference).

I jumped back on Fallout: New Vegas again today. It's kinda become a yearly ritual at this point, with probably a dozen playthroughs and over 2500 hours under my belt, god help me. Luckily there's always new mods to keep it fresh.

Do you think the Fritter stocks will hold until the Man O' War DX gets released? I was gonna wait until it comes out to place my order but if they're going that fast I might just order a couple boards now just to ensure I get my hands on one and then order the Man O' War whenever it comes out.

What in the goddamn...? That's gotta be approaching black hole levels of density! Seriously impressive work! I really dig the etching too!

That looks amazing! So clean! How did you do the graphics, screen printing?

Thanks for the kind words everyone, I'm really enjoying this build so far and am fairly proud of the way it turned out! Now I just have to find something else to do with the other 197 germanium transistors I have on hand

Are those the transistor gains written on top of each one? If so, it seems this circuit is accepting of a wide hfe range! Good to know.

Those numbers aren't the gain, they're just for identification purposes as I was sorting through a bag of 50. They're all MP16Bs, and the Hfe and leakages are 74 and .093mA for Q2, 53 and .053mA for Q3, and 86 and .091mA for Q4. The build documents call for an Hfe of 70-80ish, but Q3 appears to be fairly sensitive to leakage and wouldn't bias up right with the transistors I had in that range. Subbing in a lower gain transistor with about half the leakage got the voltages looking right and didn't seem to have any adverse impact on the sound, although I'll probably try swapping it out if I can find a transistor with similar leakage and higher gain in the batch of MP20s I'm currently sorting through.

Very nice work.  The graphic has just the right amount of fade to it.  Great looking build inside as well.  I need to go look at this circuit now.  A germanium pedal with a transformer (which I assume is an octave thing like an Octavia)?  Yes please.

No octave, unfortunately (although it's certainly not a deal breaker for me). As PMowdes2 said, it only uses the primary of the transformer at the input of the circuit, which acts as an inductor ala the AMZ pickup simulator to help it play nice with low impedance sources, such as active pickups or buffers. Definitely not a bad addition though, as this thing sounds MEAN with a Tubescreamer in front of it!

I'm quite the lover of weird fuzzes, and the folks at Spaceman have a number of products that fit the bill. When I discovered their Sputnik II fuzz, I was immediately enthralled by it. Unfortunately, by the time I found out that such a marvelous device existed the Sputnik II, which was a limited production product and not at all cheap to begin with, had long since ended its production run and was both incredibly scarce and incredibly expensive on the used market. Luckily, I found that the good gentlemen at Dead End FX, ever the intrepid explorers of sonic weirdness, had already probed the device, discovered its secrets, and released their Laika Fuzz board for those of us without a grand to spend on an original unit. I promptly snatched one up and set to work building it, and after about a month of on and off work it's finally finished! So behold, The Cosmonaut!



The graphics and finish are pretty simple, nothing too out of the ordinary here. The enclosure is a 1590BBM in Robot Silver Sparkle from Mammoth. The graphics were designed in GIMP using a picture a found in a Google image search and printed onto a waterslide decal using my cheapo Canon inkjet. I stuck it onto the enclosure using the usual method and sealed everything up with Envirotex. It turned out rather smooth, with very few bubbles to speak of and no runs around the jack holes on the sides. However, it did have a few drips hanging off the bottom, and when I went to trim them off with my X-Acto knife one of them snagged and not only put a chip on the bottom edge when it broke off but also pulled a portion of the Envirotex away from the enclosure. After a moment of panic, I grabbed a tube of superglue, squirted a bit underneath where it had pulled away, pressed it flat, and wiped away the extra, and voila! Good as new! Well, maybe not quite, but it did dry clear and fill in underneath the lifted portion well enough that it's hardly noticeable (and who looks at the bottom of their pedals, anyway?). Definitely a good trick if you happen to run into similar problems.



Here's the guts. As stated on the build document, the whole thing fits in a 1590BBM, but there's definitely not a lot of room left over for the jacks. I ended up putting mine under the board with the edge of the jack wafer right against the front of the enclosure. There's just enough clearance that nothing touches with the plugs inserted, but I stuck some electrical tape on the bottom of the board just in case. The plastic portion of the low profile lumbergs was just a bit too wide to fit between the side of the enclosure and the board, so I opted for more traditional open frame Neutriks.

I haven't gotten to play around with it for very long yet, but so far I'm in love! It's a very thick, massive, chewy fuzz with quite a bit of tonal variation thanks to the filter switches. The Range (gain) control takes it from a low growl to absolute sonic devastation! The Drift mode is absolutely wild and can produce some very interesting pseudo-feedback sounds when you mute the strings, as well as intermodulating with your notes to really change the character of the thing. Definitely a worthwhile build!

So I'm a little late to this party, but I've been working on my Aion L5 Preamp since early January and finally finished it up last week, so here it is! This was a bear of a build, and is easily the most challenging project I've tackled to date, but I'm rather impressed by the way it turned out (which is to say, working and sounding good). That said, it's still a little temperamental- the bypass LED stayed on permanently when it was wired to the channel select switch, so I ended up going with the "always on" wiring scheme. This solved the problem, but also introduced a loud popping when the bypass is engaged or disengaged, which I can only assume is due to the LED current now being switched on and off. I also had some issues getting correct readings when it came time to calibrate it, which was probably due to my cheapo signal generator more than anything else, so I just kinda adjusted the distortion and compressor trimmers to where they sounded the best. In any case, I love the way this thing sounds! Channel 1 gives a great Fender-ish clean that takes pedals really well and livens up my rather flat-sounding Gibson G40, and Channel 2 has a great overdrive that really nails the Ty Tabor sound. The compressor is really nice as well, and the limit LED is a nice touch. Overall I'm pretty happy with it, warts and all.



Here's the guts. Not my cleanest wiring job ever, but it works and isn't overly noisy, so I'm counting this as a success. I'd definitely recommend doing what wiring you can before boxing it all up though, as the space is rather tight and trying to maneuver the wires through the holes on the underside of the board with it all in place feels rather akin to performing some delicate surgery.


Here's the board from the front with the pots installed. The 2.5kA pots I ordered from Germany never arrived after 2 months of waiting, so I improvised by adding resistors to a 5kB pot in order to fake them. It works, but the taper is a little off, so I may end up ordering a couple of 5kA dual pots and just paralleling up the sections instead.

Great work, dude! Your wiring is really clean! And I agree that that enclosure color is something else, I used an enclosure in that same color for my Blueshift build and it really is wonderful to behold. So much depth!

  These 1590A builds are getting ridiculous, I have enough problems stuffing things into a 1590B! Awesome work!