Particle Accelerator - Alembic F-2B clone

vigilante398

Authorized Vendor
This one has been in the works for a long while (as @Mike McLane can attest) but I finally got a version I'm happy with. The Alembic F-2B was the first high-voltage tube pedal I ever made, and it remains a super cool tone to keep in one's arsenal.

I've always liked being able to hide the tube inside the enclosure to keep it safe from stray stomping, but I also want to make things moderately easy for people to assemble. In past designs I sacrificed usable real estate and solid layouts for simplicity of assembly, and I wanted to find a happy middle ground that still wasn't a nightmare to put together but that gave me more room to work with. This utilizes a "daughter board" for the tube to mount on with right-angle headers similar to what I do for my commercial builds, but it's offset so the tube socket doesn't cover the pins, which makes it easier to assemble and easier to troubleshoot if the soldering job wasn't perfect. I also used vertical header pins to connect the footswitch PCB to the main PCB, because I've always liked doing that. It reduces the number of wires floating around and looks nice and clean. The catch is the drilling has to be spot-on, so naturally I will be providing pre-milled enclosures and will also get a Tayda drill template put together for it for those that prefer to go that route (which I totally understand).

I only ordered 5 PCBs initially to try it out so I don't have these ready for sale yet, but I will be sending a board out to an external tester to make sure it's repeatable, then I'll stock up on boards and have these available. This one will be a little more expensive than my previous offerings partially because there are now two additional PCBs but mostly because the main PCB is a 4-layer board with internal power and ground planes. This is typically unnecessary in pedal circuits, but I consider it to be "best design practice" and it helps tame noise and oscillations, so I'm going to be doing it for everything going forward.

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Any updates on this? Not trying to rush you :)
Yup, I have new boards in hand and they have been externally verified by an independent test-builder. The build doc is 95% ready, just missing the drill template. So it's pretty much ready to go, but I was hoping to get some enclosures in so I could have pre-milled enclosures ready for the people that are into that sort of thing. Maybe next week?
 
Alright, I have enclosures on hand and I'm putting the finishing touches on the build doc right now, so I'm hoping to have these ready to go live this evening. I will of course keep everyone posted.
 
This looks pretty amazing.

What input voltage does it need to convert to 200+ volts for the tube?
 
Thanks for this. I've been following you for a while and bought a Space Heater kit a while ago, then spent more $$ buying this and the EF the other day. Super stoked, now just need to find any spare time to build...
 
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