Fingolfen
Well-known member
Unless you've been under a rock, you'll know that the Colorsound Power Boost is one of Steggo's favorite pedals - especially with the volume knob mod. It can work anywhere from a mostly clean boost to a very nice dirty boost. It's also an essential piece of kit if you're wanting to try and replicate David Gilmour's pedal board. I've built several versions of the pedal, but the ones with vintage bits are usually my favorite. They're fun to build because, well if I'm being honest, I love to mess around with old components. To my ear they also sound a bit different, though I admit it could be confirmation bias. I don't think there's any inherent "mojo" in the bits, I just think they vary in different directions than modern components do. The vintage resistors and caps I've measured frequently tend to be a bit over spec, whereas most of the modern ones I've measured tend to be a bit under spec.
I had a request for a custom vintage thagomizer build. While I'd done a vintage build with Allen-Bradley resistors on the South Obolon FX Thagomizer board, I'd never done one with predominantly Iskra resistors (eagle eyed readers will spot the one Allen-Bradley hiding in the middle of the PCB). For the most part, this build exactly mirrors the Thagomizer on my personal board with one or two minor substitutions. As always, I had a lot of fun getting the larger Iskra resistors to fit on the modern PCB - which of course gets amped up quite a bit when you try and get tropical fish capacitors to fit on the board! The transistors are all NOS as well. The only modern bits are in the charge pump portion of the circuit that takes the incoming 9V power and cranks it up to the 18V that the circuit is designed for.
Even with the big honkin' tropical fish capacitors, the board sits low enough in the enclosure so I can use Switchcraft 111X jacks for the audio in/out. They're a tad bit close to a couple of the the big capacitors, but not to where they interfere with actually plugging the pedal in. The DC jack is a Lumberg, but this new board/enclosure isn't designed for a battery. Per my normal process, I'm using my 3PDT daughter board for the switch and LED, and all of the connections to the jacks are insulated with heat shrink tubing.
For the enclosure, this one was a special request. I'd done a black text on orange before, but was asked if I could "reverse that." So now we have orange on black. I decided to take a couple of cues from my Secret Spinosaurus and snagged a black stomp switch. I also used the same anodized black nut for the switch and the same black aluminum knobs. I really love how the pedal came out, and it sounds amazing! Hopefully the end user will like it as much as I do!
Original blog entry: https://steggostudios.blogspot.com/2024/04/a-custom-vintage-thagomizer.html
I had a request for a custom vintage thagomizer build. While I'd done a vintage build with Allen-Bradley resistors on the South Obolon FX Thagomizer board, I'd never done one with predominantly Iskra resistors (eagle eyed readers will spot the one Allen-Bradley hiding in the middle of the PCB). For the most part, this build exactly mirrors the Thagomizer on my personal board with one or two minor substitutions. As always, I had a lot of fun getting the larger Iskra resistors to fit on the modern PCB - which of course gets amped up quite a bit when you try and get tropical fish capacitors to fit on the board! The transistors are all NOS as well. The only modern bits are in the charge pump portion of the circuit that takes the incoming 9V power and cranks it up to the 18V that the circuit is designed for.
Even with the big honkin' tropical fish capacitors, the board sits low enough in the enclosure so I can use Switchcraft 111X jacks for the audio in/out. They're a tad bit close to a couple of the the big capacitors, but not to where they interfere with actually plugging the pedal in. The DC jack is a Lumberg, but this new board/enclosure isn't designed for a battery. Per my normal process, I'm using my 3PDT daughter board for the switch and LED, and all of the connections to the jacks are insulated with heat shrink tubing.
For the enclosure, this one was a special request. I'd done a black text on orange before, but was asked if I could "reverse that." So now we have orange on black. I decided to take a couple of cues from my Secret Spinosaurus and snagged a black stomp switch. I also used the same anodized black nut for the switch and the same black aluminum knobs. I really love how the pedal came out, and it sounds amazing! Hopefully the end user will like it as much as I do!
Original blog entry: https://steggostudios.blogspot.com/2024/04/a-custom-vintage-thagomizer.html
