What’s on *YOUR* workbench?
- Thread starter Bricksnbeatles
- Start date
Asdrael
Well-known member
I am starting out pedal building and since I have access to a CO2 laser, I decided my first pedal didn't have to be ugly. At least from the outside 
I found the gfx somewhere and had fun with the rest (names, etc). It's an OCD clone (AionFX Titan, but bought from Musikding). Let's see what the soldering brings.
I found the gfx somewhere and had fun with the rest (names, etc). It's an OCD clone (AionFX Titan, but bought from Musikding). Let's see what the soldering brings.
Mentaltossflycoon
Well-known member
I am starting out pedal building and since I have access to a CO2 laser, I decided my first pedal didn't have to be ugly. At least from the outside
View attachment 79484
I found the gfx somewhere and had fun with the rest (names, etc). It's an OCD clone (AionFX Titan, but bought from Musikding). Let's see what the soldering brings.
Paradox916
Well-known member
Love black limba, natural finish, gloss would be safe but I’m leaning towards satin.
Asdrael
Well-known member
My pick would be a hard wax oil. It will give a nice wet wood effect and decent amount of protection, without even the need to pore fill.
I have used Osmo Polyx on my latest build and I can only recommend it. Easy to apply, dries fairly quickly, and if you are not aiming for an ultra gloss you'll be fine.
Fama
Well-known member
I put the Drömtydning together, worked correctly on first try! Really liking how it looks, although it's a bit darker in real life. Also sounds quite nice and interesting, even though I'm not sold on using the fuzz for fuzzy stuff - maybe going into a tube amp it might work better than in a post-amp loop on the Quad Cortex. But I'm fine without having it fuzz, the modulation side is more what I'm interested in personally.
Edit: I used a NE5532 for the op-amp, plus there's the feedback mod, but everything else is standard. Found the XR2206 from the most barebones possible zen cart store in whole of Finland, where the conditions of use literally say "Conditions of Use Sample Text ...", but that's how you know it's legit - nobody would put so little effort into a scam site. Only threat there was probably if the owner had died and the website was still up because it's running on a desktop computer in some closet.
Edit2: I think I'll mod the feedback mod further by adding a series resistor, it bypasses the feedback resistor completely and ramps up too quick, I think I can balance it a bit so it feeds back, but not nearly instantly, just a little bit slower, making it more useful. I think I'll have to rig it up so I can test resistors while it's online, or maybe put a trimmer in instead
Edit: I used a NE5532 for the op-amp, plus there's the feedback mod, but everything else is standard. Found the XR2206 from the most barebones possible zen cart store in whole of Finland, where the conditions of use literally say "Conditions of Use Sample Text ...", but that's how you know it's legit - nobody would put so little effort into a scam site. Only threat there was probably if the owner had died and the website was still up because it's running on a desktop computer in some closet.
Edit2: I think I'll mod the feedback mod further by adding a series resistor, it bypasses the feedback resistor completely and ramps up too quick, I think I can balance it a bit so it feeds back, but not nearly instantly, just a little bit slower, making it more useful. I think I'll have to rig it up so I can test resistors while it's online, or maybe put a trimmer in instead
Last edited:
pingpongcomputer
Well-known member
Good call, thank you very much, pins 4 and 5 were not making contact, would have been a nightmare to troubleshoot. I found a KB v2 schematic along the way, if anyone needs one for continuity checks DM me.
kerryfine
Well-known member
Beautiful art!
Asdrael
Well-known member
Well I just put my first pedal together - an AionFX titan kit from Musikding with minimum modifications (basically much less gain). It took me 4 hours total from laying out the components on the table to putting the wire clips in the trash. No difficulty except the recommended drilling for the 9V and the jacks is TIGHT.
Happy however to report it works on the first try and produces the sounds I was after. The range of the Tone knob seems rather small so I might check what's up with that. I haven't tried any of the inner switches yet so there is that.
I don't think the insides look that bad too!
I'm still fond of what I did with the laser though
I wanted to put an engraved acrylic sheet on top but I didn't have enough thread on the pots and switches to do that. Next time!
Happy however to report it works on the first try and produces the sounds I was after. The range of the Tone knob seems rather small so I might check what's up with that. I haven't tried any of the inner switches yet so there is that.
I don't think the insides look that bad too!
I'm still fond of what I did with the laser though
I wanted to put an engraved acrylic sheet on top but I didn't have enough thread on the pots and switches to do that. Next time!
giovanni
Well-known member
I also have access to a CO2 laser, we should exchange notes sometimes…I am starting out pedal building and since I have access to a CO2 laser, I decided my first pedal didn't have to be ugly. At least from the outside
View attachment 79484
I found the gfx somewhere and had fun with the rest (names, etc). It's an OCD clone (AionFX Titan, but bought from Musikding). Let's see what the soldering brings.
Asdrael
Well-known member
I also have access to a CO2 laser, we should exchange notes sometimes…
Definitely! Ours is 100W. I engraved this powder coated case in 3 passes with 15% power, 350mm/s and 0.065 steps if I remember correctly. I want to bump the power a tad to stay at 2 passes for next time.
kerryfine
Well-known member
Perfboard complete. Really enjoying the point to point process again. Prolongs the soldering fun for me. Just need to order enclosure and PCB mount gain and volume pots. Have non-PCB mount but the layout was nice and lined everything up.
Not sure what this Purple and White Ge diode is but out of my assorted stock sounded the best. 2N7000 mosfet + Ge on one side and 1N4148 on other asymmetric clipping after lots of trial.
B1K gain pot instead of B50K in schematic works better. Transistors are Toshiba 2SA478 Q1 hfe 65 leak 38, Q2 hfe 67 leak 68, Q3 hfe 82 leak 69. Also after some trial and error.
Dang, that is some super clean soldering on the back of that perfboard! I hadn't heard of the TA-100 before, so I just looked it up and, unsurprisingly, yet another circuit has landed on my "to do" list.
On my workbench, I have a PoT (AionFX Achilles) and a Barbershop (Effects Layouts Tonsorium) just about ready to go into a 1590BB—it'll be my first two-in-one pedal. I plan to add an order switcher as well. Fingers crossed the PoT and Barbershop work well together for me!
I finished building my EAE Beholder and the DEFX Amnesia (ss/bs No Memory clone). I like both, but I'm not sure if I made them "right."
When I hit the strings hard or turn the gain up past 9 o'clock, the Beholder starts to clip in a way that sounds like my speaker is farting out. My guess is there must be an issue somewhere in my work on the circuit. I'm going to put this one down for now though—I spent far too much time troubleshooting what I thought was an error of mine on the board that instead turned out to be an issue with one of the practice amps I was using to demo the circuit. In any case, the Beholder sounds like a Reverberation Machine with waaaay more nastiness on tap, a wider range of tonal variation (it has a Filter knob as opposed to the Bright/Dark switch), and a momentary oscillation switch. I was happy to discover that I can also achieve a more straightforward reverb sound by dialing back the gain a bunch (this was something I hadn't heard demonstrated in any of the demo vids people have made of this pedal).
The Amnesia sounds really nice as well, but oh man did building it give me trouble. Turns out my I/O and DC jacks weren't the right size for the Tayda drill template I got from another user here. I should have double-checked my measurements! As a result, I had a crazy difficult time fitting everything into the enclosure. After fighting with geometry for a while, I eventually decided to re-drill those holes. To add to this, I had to wire the trimpot off-board in order to fit the CV jack in its place. It turns out you really do need the vertical/rectangular trimpots for this build—if you use one of the square ones (like I did), you simply can't fit it next to the CV jack.
As mentioned above, the Amnesia sounds good. I can get a nice slapback delay, bright-to-dark repeats, and wacky pitch-shifting goodness. Here are some minor issues I'm experiencing though:
Oh, and lastly, I have a 1590DD enclosure lying around. It's huge and I have no idea why I bought it or what ought to go into it.
On my workbench, I have a PoT (AionFX Achilles) and a Barbershop (Effects Layouts Tonsorium) just about ready to go into a 1590BB—it'll be my first two-in-one pedal. I plan to add an order switcher as well. Fingers crossed the PoT and Barbershop work well together for me!
I finished building my EAE Beholder and the DEFX Amnesia (ss/bs No Memory clone). I like both, but I'm not sure if I made them "right."
When I hit the strings hard or turn the gain up past 9 o'clock, the Beholder starts to clip in a way that sounds like my speaker is farting out. My guess is there must be an issue somewhere in my work on the circuit. I'm going to put this one down for now though—I spent far too much time troubleshooting what I thought was an error of mine on the board that instead turned out to be an issue with one of the practice amps I was using to demo the circuit. In any case, the Beholder sounds like a Reverberation Machine with waaaay more nastiness on tap, a wider range of tonal variation (it has a Filter knob as opposed to the Bright/Dark switch), and a momentary oscillation switch. I was happy to discover that I can also achieve a more straightforward reverb sound by dialing back the gain a bunch (this was something I hadn't heard demonstrated in any of the demo vids people have made of this pedal).
The Amnesia sounds really nice as well, but oh man did building it give me trouble. Turns out my I/O and DC jacks weren't the right size for the Tayda drill template I got from another user here. I should have double-checked my measurements! As a result, I had a crazy difficult time fitting everything into the enclosure. After fighting with geometry for a while, I eventually decided to re-drill those holes. To add to this, I had to wire the trimpot off-board in order to fit the CV jack in its place. It turns out you really do need the vertical/rectangular trimpots for this build—if you use one of the square ones (like I did), you simply can't fit it next to the CV jack.
As mentioned above, the Amnesia sounds good. I can get a nice slapback delay, bright-to-dark repeats, and wacky pitch-shifting goodness. Here are some minor issues I'm experiencing though:
- I wish that there were more volume in both the dry signal and the repeats. I get unity volume for the dry signal when the dry knob is at 4 o'clock and the wet signal never really gets louder than the dry signal even when dimed. I'm not sure if that's supposed to be the case or not. (I've noticed that the PT2399 delays I've made have quieter repeats than I'd like.) This also means that it's difficult to get long, droning repeats because the volume dies off too soon.
- I'm not sure I fully understand the "Range" knob. It seems that it just extends the, um, range of the Time knob when Mod is turned on. Maybe that's all it's intended to do? DEFX doesn't seem to have any more info on its site unfortunately. I've had a hard time finding more info about this elsewhere.
- I'm getting a fairly annoying switch pop. I'm not sure what the best way to go about diagnosing that is, but I'm reluctant to put this pedal on a board until I find a good fix.
- Brian (ss/bs) showed off some cool sounds the pedal can do in an old demo video he made. Comb filtering and chorusing in particular—I'm having a hard time recreating those sounds with the Amnesia.
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Oh, and lastly, I have a 1590DD enclosure lying around. It's huge and I have no idea why I bought it or what ought to go into it.
I have this old knockoff FF enclosure that I bought at the pawn shop like 30 something years ago for $10. I thought it would be fun to repurpose the enclosure and build a new fuzz in it.
But then I thought “I better check what this is to make sure it’s not actually worth something.” For whatever reason I have never done this.
So it turns out this thing might actually be valuable. It looks just like these guyatones on reverb marked at like $500(!)
So I guess I’ll pause on that idea!
But then I thought “I better check what this is to make sure it’s not actually worth something.” For whatever reason I have never done this.
So it turns out this thing might actually be valuable. It looks just like these guyatones on reverb marked at like $500(!)
So I guess I’ll pause on that idea!
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Bricksnbeatles
Member known well
Today is less about what’s on my workbench, and more what isn’t on it. Finally making some real progress on getting things reorganized and into a useable state. No more piles of empty Taya’s baggies and random loose hardware everywhere. I wanna actually get something built this week.
Such a good feeling with everything in it’s place after the accumulation over a number of builds.
Ready to do it all over again!