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I love 60's and 70's fuzz tones. I have bought and built a Dallas Treble booster, Fuzz Faces, Tonebenders and Octave pedals. I'm trying to build the a Mk1 Tonebender, I have built a Mk2, and a Mk3, and I'm happy how they turned out. I considered the TB Mk1 too much trouble to make, as I saw...

I’m in the midst of building a Tone Vendor MK1 pedal out of circumstance rather than choice. Knowing the hassle with finding the right transistors let alone the “right” components I thought I would buy one. This should have been the end of it. I saw collector effectors on Facebook and he had...

I have tried this and pedals do become expensive quickly. Over a decade ago I bought AC-128’s and the majority of them were rubbish. I managed to build a very expensive Fuzz Face. Regards Mark

Yeah, I hear what you are saying I built a Fuzz Face using 2N3904’s and it sounded brilliant. It was as good as my Fulltone 69 pedal but with a nicer top end. Regards Mark

That seems fair criticism. I used Tayda recently and they were very cheap, the postage was cheap and I received them quickly. I saw a guy in Canada called ThorpeFX selling Ge transistors on Etsy, has anyone used him? Regards Mark

Okay fair enough. I have bought matched sets of germanium transistors from them before 2020 and afterwards and the transistors worked well. I don’t know if they were the perfect transistors for the effect, but I was happy with the results. Regards Mark

Why wouldn’t you trust Small Bear? I have used their transistors in the past and they worked fine. What problems did you encounter? Regards Mark

Thanks for your reply. I have tried breadboard a Tonebender MK 2 and it was pretty noisy. I think using transistor sockets mean low noise because the pcb layout and ease of transistor swapping. The only issue is changing resistor values to accommodate the transistors. Thanks again for your...

Hi I’m building (maybe trying to satisfactorily build) a Tonebender MK 1. I’m after the Ronson/Bowie and Yardbirds fuzz tones. I was wondering if the Mill Max TO-5 transistor socket fits onto the board? As far as I can tell it would but I thought it costs nothing to ask the question...

How it turn out? Was your TB MK1 smooth sounding or did it have the Velcro thing going on? I was wondering if the transistors will a gain if a 100+ were too small. In that there was too much gain and compression. Thanks for your help. Regards Mark

Thanks I would appreciate that. Regards Mark

Great looking build. How did you do the graphics and where did you get the enclosure? I’m wondering how you chose the transistors. As far as I can tell Q1 has to have a gain of 60-80 with relatively high leakage such as 200uA. Transistor Q2 has a bias network so it doesn’t have to be leaky to...

Hi Nice looking build, how did you did the graphics? I was wondering about the gain and leakage of the transistors that you used when building your pedal? Regards Mark

Hi I have a TV MK1 board to build. Did you measure the gain and leakage of the transistors you used with a Peak DCA-55 before using them? If so what Gain/Hfe did you use in each transistor. As far as I can tell the first and third transistors need high leakage, what leakage did you use...

I was looking at a build using 2N7000 MOSFETS. I built the Lemonade Drive and I found the FETs available were dodgy. I end up getting NOS components which worked well. Is there any issues with the 2N7000’s that are now available? Thanks for your assistance. Regards Mark

Thanks for your replies, they were very helpful. I didn’t want to go through the nonsense I did with the FET’s. Regards Mark

I was building a Lemonade pedal and found that the new 2N5457 FET’s were no good and I would need NOS FETs for the build. The NOS 2N5457 worked like a charm. I was wondering if the BS170 transistors have and issues the 2N5457 FETs? Thanks for your assistance. Regards Mark

One thing that I have noticed is if the battery gets down to 7vdc the pedal sounds like the bias is off. I think this pedal is better off being run from a power supply. Regards Mark

Thanks Hamish R for your reply, much appreciated. As seen in my attachment, the difference between the Fairchild 2N5457's and the Motorola 2N5457's is night and day. A huge thank you to Phil for supplying with the Motorola 2N5457's, having the right part makes a huge difference. There is one...

Still reading up on FET’s, the calculator implies the source resistor is too large to have the Vd at 4.5vdc. With the data I had it states the Rs would need to be 390 ohms. JFET calculator