pingpongcomputer
Well-known member
Arkaim first, very pleasant build. Low parts count, beautiful pcb layout, drill template was spot on for UV printing and drilling my own holes. I don't love the sound on guitar, most high gain metal fuzz sounds kind of cheesy to me, but on bass it's tons of fun and seems like you could find a good spot in most mixes with the eq section.
I used the low gain BC338-16 variants in both positions and the fuzz doesn't get blown out or overwhelmed until Input is close to maxed and More is dialed up high and switched on, but even with the More boost off and Input down there still isn't really a low gain sound in there.
Tayda UV print on silver hammer turned out darned purty.
The Zuperbee turned out to be an ugly and frustrating build, but it makes every sound you could want out of a superfuzz variant. There's barely enough room to fit 1/4" and DC jacks at the top in a Tayda 1590BBS, even with the bottom of the pcb nearly touching the bottom of the enclosure, I'm not sure I could have moved it any lower and still fit the 3pdt's, but I made it work. I decided to add an external switch on the top instead of a jumper or internal dip switch for turning starve on/off for q6. There are 4 holes on the board for each of the transistors and all of them are labeled EBCE from top to bottom, except q5, ECBE, which I didn't notice while populating. So that's 100% my fault for not reading, but still kind of silly imo just to have the octave trannys facing back to back, there's probably a valid PCB layout reason for the switch there that's above my head, I'll give the benefit of the doubt, and the build is supposed to go in a BB2 or 1590C, so all of my gripes are moot if I'd followed instructions. Anyway, I lifted the collector solder pad wicking q5 to flip it around, so I had to wire the collector directly to the collector of q4 which seems to have worked out fine. I tried wiring it to the point where the both meet on the gain dpdt switch at first and that did not work, maybe they don't actually meet there idk. It was a tight fit for the LEDs on the underside of the board for some reason, so I coated them with insulating varnish after soldering on some leads to make sure nothing shorted out, you can see some leaked down around the edges of the lenses on the front.
The sound is great, the low gain setting is magical for me and made the whole thing worth it.
I do like the control layout on the top side for this one, visually pleasing and ergonomic. For the art I wanted to play around with overlapping colors and bits of lower layers and the enclosure color poking through, which turned out pretty chaotic but I like it. I used a gloss print just on the text and it does a nice job making it legible in normal light, I tried to show that in the last picture. Tayda UV print on metallic candy purple.
I used the low gain BC338-16 variants in both positions and the fuzz doesn't get blown out or overwhelmed until Input is close to maxed and More is dialed up high and switched on, but even with the More boost off and Input down there still isn't really a low gain sound in there.
Tayda UV print on silver hammer turned out darned purty.
The Zuperbee turned out to be an ugly and frustrating build, but it makes every sound you could want out of a superfuzz variant. There's barely enough room to fit 1/4" and DC jacks at the top in a Tayda 1590BBS, even with the bottom of the pcb nearly touching the bottom of the enclosure, I'm not sure I could have moved it any lower and still fit the 3pdt's, but I made it work. I decided to add an external switch on the top instead of a jumper or internal dip switch for turning starve on/off for q6. There are 4 holes on the board for each of the transistors and all of them are labeled EBCE from top to bottom, except q5, ECBE, which I didn't notice while populating. So that's 100% my fault for not reading, but still kind of silly imo just to have the octave trannys facing back to back, there's probably a valid PCB layout reason for the switch there that's above my head, I'll give the benefit of the doubt, and the build is supposed to go in a BB2 or 1590C, so all of my gripes are moot if I'd followed instructions. Anyway, I lifted the collector solder pad wicking q5 to flip it around, so I had to wire the collector directly to the collector of q4 which seems to have worked out fine. I tried wiring it to the point where the both meet on the gain dpdt switch at first and that did not work, maybe they don't actually meet there idk. It was a tight fit for the LEDs on the underside of the board for some reason, so I coated them with insulating varnish after soldering on some leads to make sure nothing shorted out, you can see some leaked down around the edges of the lenses on the front.
The sound is great, the low gain setting is magical for me and made the whole thing worth it.
I do like the control layout on the top side for this one, visually pleasing and ergonomic. For the art I wanted to play around with overlapping colors and bits of lower layers and the enclosure color poking through, which turned out pretty chaotic but I like it. I used a gloss print just on the text and it does a nice job making it legible in normal light, I tried to show that in the last picture. Tayda UV print on metallic candy purple.
