After a month of talking in different directions with Tayda, a near miss and catastrophic failure* later, it's
finally done!
This is taking the things about the Klon I didn't like (including its mystique and cork-sniffing cult) and poking it with a stick, putting it under the knife, and whatever other non-engineer-adjacent procedure to see what happened. After many board designs, premature celebrations, and abject design failures, here we are at revision 1.3e! "Does it sound
right?" Don't @#$%ing care. "But you didn't use X diode?!!1!?" Doubly don't @#$%ing care. This board utilizes a 4 position slide switch to go between 4 pairs of clipping diodes, none of which are the anointed ones. This particular setup has (in reverse order from the gutshot): 1N270, 1N60P, BAT46, 1N5817. I haven't tried every suitable clipping pair out there, but so far these are my favorite.
But what's that other board doing in there?
We have a simple Based on a True Story approximation of the LPB-1 boost. This is to add more frontal lobe hair to the signal, since I like having an extra kick in the pants (and the OD level of the other circuit just isn't OD'y enough at times), and it's nice to have it on a switch, to really kick it up. At one point (see abject failure build), these were integrated onto one board, but between inexperience and peace of mind, I've left them separate.
I like the effect the gloss UV has on this design; makes the blood look more bloody at the edges anyway. In a perfect world, I'd want to have several coats of UV gloss at each color separation layer. I had this idea since toying with the name. At one point I had commissioned a friend to do a piece, but between health, family, and work I didn't want to be another time vampire to him. The original concept was going to be a sort of Lich-ified Vlad Dracul coming back from the tomb. My friend has a very cool art style that would have suited that concept:
And here's a shot of the flat artwork of the final product:
The splattering is a vectorization of a kind of moment of frustration during design school: I was doing something with India Ink and it wasn't going where I wanted, so I let a bunch of it pool up on my large paper then dropped one of my heavy art history textbooks on it.
Alright let me address the elephant in the room that you may or may not see. I was not
consciously aping off of Madbean's "Kingslayer" name. My brain knew "Sunking" from way back when I started DIY, and then the Imp of more modern times since I've begun again. I saw "kingslayer" I think in the archives, but I didn't put two and two together. I had originally intended to name this "Return of the King" meaning the Sunking, since that (v3) was my very first etch (I'm pretty sure I did it before attempting that massive phaser...) and build that I was happy with.
It's just been that itch I can't scratch for so long, and now I'm finally foregoing the calamine lotion and digging in!
I've struggled between the experience/interface of signal path vs logical wiring on this thing for a while now.
The signal path goes into the small board (opposite side of the box) and then into the main board. It's not as spaghetti as it appears, but it's also not super, perfectly clean. I like it though, so there's something in that, since I have a hard time with most things I create.
Anyhow, hope you enjoy.
edit:
*So the near-failure came from my penchant for wanting things to be tight and not come apart—too tight, it turns out. I over torqued the nut on the gain pot, and rendered it useless. I have a terrible track record with the vacuum desolder station. I had started out with a few old boards I needed to salvage components from, and that didn't go well... I was doing my utmost to save the board, but none of those were going to go anywhere but the recycling box. Thankfully, I was able to replace the dual-ganger losing none of the pad material in the process!
