Dead End FX Gnawty

fuzz

Member
Finished up the build the other day. Everything went together as expected and without a hitch, with a couple exceptions.

The rotary selector pot has a different Z height than the standard pots and toggles and at first I couldn’t figure out why everything was not sitting flat but at an angle. Finally realized this and wasn’t sure how to rectify. Ended up drilling out the hole to accommodate more of the pot to come through the enclosure as seen in the pic. Problem solved.

Second issue was the drill template. It says print at no scale or 100% and yet it didn’t match up. It was still smaller than it should be compared to the pcb. I ended up taking a screenshot and pasting into word and then adjusting the scale and then printing. Upon some deeper searching it seems I’m not the only one, and someone whom I assume is from DEFX made a comment along the lines of we expect you all to know what you are doing, implying an incorrect template should be acceptable. I’m unsure about this take. I’ve never had this issue with other builds, but I cannot confirm 100% that it’s not my printer dialogue that’s not working as it should. Anyways, pro or not I think an accurate drill template is to be expected. Th fully I opted to drill myself instead of farming it out.

The third issue was both the lack of a top jack/power template and the fact that there seemed to be a bunch of shit on the pcb where the jacks would normally go. It was resolved but I spent more time than I usually do measuring and testing and measuring again…

Pedal sounds great, I socketed the transistors so I could experiment but currently using 2N5088’s cause thise are the only ones I have enough of. Might mix and match a bit.

It’s a big pedal, and I am new to this hobby, and don’t know a thing about tracing layouts, but there seems to be excessive dead space, not sure if things could be reduced to a smaller footprint. There’s already a ton of knobs so not sure how feasible that would be.
 

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Man that thing is a beast! You're definitely right about a ton of wasted real estate, seems like that was done to just have spacing for all of the knobs/pots. DeadEnd is notorious for their ridiculous sizes boards, they do have some really cool projects others sites don't have. Still gotta build out my Tatiana board.
 
Neat build, definitely a beast.

So when you printed out the drill-template, did you select the scale to letter-size or A4?





One of the reasons I don't like some DEFX boards excessive dead-space is...
What if I want to mod it and add a footswitch? A toggle and an extra pot?
AND
Sometimes the layout kind of sucks with knobs and switches too close to the footswitch.

Recently I saw a DEFX board that allowed for top-jacks without interference with the board and its components. Things are improving in that regard. Maybe.

Still, the circuits are cool and I do have some DEFX on hand, but gnawt this one yet.




Given that the Gnawty is essentially a modular Muff (BTMB Royal Beaver) and the schematic is in the build doc, it'd be possible to recreate the circuit with PedalPCB's Muffin Crumbs (and Tone Muffin Crumb) and have full control of the controls-layout... I'd use 9mm pots and Davies 1900 knobs to tighten up the controls; the rotary switch wouldn't upset the balance of the other controls 'cause it'd be offboard wired... or ditch the rotary altogether and stick in whatever preferred TONE mods you like with mid-scoop knobs or switches...
 
There’s a few DEFX boards I’m considering. I think your critiques sum up my reservations on them. But hey, they bring the weird and someone’s gotta.

That dip looks great.
 
That dip and knob-swap bring a whole new level of super-coolio to the build. :cool:


RE Letter vs A4
I think Digi2T is State-side, so I imagine the drill template is 8.5" x 11" letter-sized.
However, PMowdes is on the other side of the Atlantic, IIRC, so it could still be A4-sized docs/drill-templates...
🤷‍♂️
 
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