KR Sound
Well-known member
- Build Rating
Once I got the awesome purple handmade and powder coated enclosure from @steviejr92 , I knew I had the perfect board for it. I’ve been practicing layouts with KiCad, trying to improve and learn how to best run traces and situate components. One of the earliest ones I worked on was a simple fuzz face using a TC1044SCPA voltage inverter to stay with center negative.
Getting the actual circuit to work took a few iterations. The first one kinda worked, but I had my pot spacing too close and the wrong footprints for the transistors. If you look closely, you’ll see the what took me a few days to finally figure out later on. I also tried doing the mosfet polarity protection, but, I don’t know. Maybe another time.
Take 2- I laid the board out a bit differently, and this is when I found the fatal error. When I drew up the schematic, I must’ve used the wrong tags for the positive and negative rails because it had them running together at one point. Like out of pins 5 and 8 of the chip. SMH. Ya, that’s not gonna work. The chip immediately started to overheat as soon as I plugged it in. Ha.
So I tried this just to see if I could magically save it by cutting the connection.
Nope. Nice try buddy. I even had the thing all built and boxed. No dice!
Then version 3- I removed the mosfet thingy altogether, renamed my power sections in the schematic and rerouted it. Two weeks later by the magic of JLC, I got it and had to immediately put it together. That was last night and I couldn’t test it until this morning.
Glorious fuzz comes through the Twin. I spent a few minutes dialing in the trimmers. I’m using a GT305B @ 87 hFE for Q1 and a R55503 @ 143 hFE. They are both around 150 uA leakage.
This was a great learning experience and Steve’s enclosure is amazing. It looks so much better in person than my pics convey. Thanks man!
Here’s a quick little demo with the Twin volume on 2 straight into Reaper with an SM57. I ride the volume on the Tele so you can hear how it dials back nicely.
Getting the actual circuit to work took a few iterations. The first one kinda worked, but I had my pot spacing too close and the wrong footprints for the transistors. If you look closely, you’ll see the what took me a few days to finally figure out later on. I also tried doing the mosfet polarity protection, but, I don’t know. Maybe another time.
Take 2- I laid the board out a bit differently, and this is when I found the fatal error. When I drew up the schematic, I must’ve used the wrong tags for the positive and negative rails because it had them running together at one point. Like out of pins 5 and 8 of the chip. SMH. Ya, that’s not gonna work. The chip immediately started to overheat as soon as I plugged it in. Ha.
So I tried this just to see if I could magically save it by cutting the connection.
Nope. Nice try buddy. I even had the thing all built and boxed. No dice!
Then version 3- I removed the mosfet thingy altogether, renamed my power sections in the schematic and rerouted it. Two weeks later by the magic of JLC, I got it and had to immediately put it together. That was last night and I couldn’t test it until this morning.
Glorious fuzz comes through the Twin. I spent a few minutes dialing in the trimmers. I’m using a GT305B @ 87 hFE for Q1 and a R55503 @ 143 hFE. They are both around 150 uA leakage.
This was a great learning experience and Steve’s enclosure is amazing. It looks so much better in person than my pics convey. Thanks man!
Here’s a quick little demo with the Twin volume on 2 straight into Reaper with an SM57. I ride the volume on the Tele so you can hear how it dials back nicely.
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