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Picking a favorite fuzz pedal is like picking your favorite offspring. With that said, the Rotobone is a strong candidate for my favorite fuzz. Enough has been written elsewhere about its trumpet-like tones, the glassy cleans when you roll back the volume knob, and its wide range of more...

I strongly recommend against relying on Fuzz Central for information about the Tone Bender Mk. II. It is an outdated and unreliable source of information. Among other problems, it incorrectly recommends biasing Q3 to -4.5v (you actually want somewhere between -7.5v and -8.75v, depending on your...

This one is about as straightforward as they get. What is it? As the enclosure subtly hints, it's not actually a Tube Screamer. Rather, it's a Rat. I used a Motorola LM308HZ for the op amp and a TO-18 metal can 2N4393 for the JFET. The enclosure is a matte black sand 125B from Tayda, UV printed...

Yep. One of the internal trimmers (Octave) controls the resistance between the collector and base of Q2, which sets the intensity (and location on the fretboard) of the suboctave undertone. It's very much a set-to-taste control. I had good results from starting with the total Q2 collector-base...

After tracing the Latent Lemon Hurts, an interesting contemporary take on the venerable Interfax Harmonic Percolator, I laid out a couple of PCBs for a similar Harmonic Percolator build. I couldn't make up my mind as to whether I wanted to build a 1590BB2 pedal like the Hurts or whether I wanted...

This is such an awesome drive pedal. I'll post a full build report later, but here are some pics in the meantime. Q1, Q4, and Q5 are BC549C (hFE ~520), Q2 is a 2N4123 from Tayda (hFE 79), and Q3 is a General Instrument 2N1304 (hFE 57 leakage 13µA). If you haven't built one yet, grab a Gerber...

Resurrecting this thread because it deserves to live. Here's a PCB for a metal can LM308/2N4393 Rat that I just sent off to JLCPCB. I went with val over RefDes because the stock values are unbeatable.

Sure, but you shouldn’t need to change the Deep switch configuration if the only thing that you want to do is change the type of trimmer.

I agree that a Percolator is a good use for low hFE germanium transistors, but I am not a huge fan of that layout. The 3362 single turn trimmers that are used in that layout don't give you sufficiently granular control over the octave or oscillation. If you do build it, I recommend adjusting the...

It helps to dial in the octave by slightly adjusting the bias of Q4 and Q5. You can set it by comparing collector and base voltages on Q4 and Q5, or just dial it in by ear.

No worries! Speaking for myself (and probably many others), I love seeing your builds, so please do keep posting them!

That’s a very cool build, but you should be posting this in its own build report thread, rather than repurposing @MattG’s build report as your own.

Those are both awesome builds! Somewhat off topic, but what is your technique for etching enclosures? They always look really sharp and clean.

Not quite. Check out @thomasbe86's awesome interactive diode I/V measurements. There's a subtle (but possibly noticeable) difference between the 2D503B/KD503B and 1N914/1N4148:

The title of this post is 100% accurate. This is indeed a really cool build. Love the control layout, the PCBs, and especially that row of inductors. Very neat story about how you got ahold of that last one, too. (As an aside, seeing a picture of your Roland BeeBaa build a decade or so ago was...

Not sure what an oberstgerichensgrubentshoffenzolenz is, but I'm very skeptical that I can count to five in support of the proposition that IEEPA authorizes the president to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited duration on nearly all goods from nearly every country in the world.

The Federal Circuit just affirmed the Court of International Trade's ruling that the tariffs imposed by five executive orders were illegal because they were not authorized by statute. The ruling is on hold through October 14 to allow the government the opportunity to file a petition for a writ...

Not my most recent build (I built it last January, so it's one of my older builds), but a very enjoyable one. For those not in the know, the Buzzaround (PedalPCB Gnat) is a wonderfully nasty germanium fuzz. Garage rock? Psychedelia? Death metal? Sure, the Buzzaround can handle all of those and...

Thanks! I had the opposite experience with the pedal and Boris—the Elk Sustainar was my belated introduction to Boris. I really wasn't expecting to like the Sustainar as much as I have so far. It's right up there with the Dope Priest and Ram's Head for my favorite Big Muff builds.

As @Aleph Null (and many others among us) can attest, spelling errors can have shockingly long lives. But when it comes to pedals, few have had a longer life when some anonymous employee of Hoshino Gakki decided to name the company's new Big Muff clone "Super Fuzz Sustainar." It's about 53 years...