A pair of drives (Tommy and Face Melter)

spi

Well-known member
This weekend I finished up a couple of drives.

First up is Timmy the Enchanter (Tommy III PCB). I've never owned or played a Timmy, and given its widespread popularity, felt I should remedy that.

I read somewhere that Paul C named this pedal after the Monty Python character Tim the Enchanter. For graphics I pulled a cool sketch from the internet--unfortunately I grabbed it in a frenzy of pulling different options, and then I was unable to relocate the source I took it from, so cannot give credit to the artist (hopefully they don't mind I took this).

The Timmy sounds pretty much what I expected--since I already built a Mach 1, and these suit the same purpose being "transparent low-gain" drives with a similar circuit. I prefer the simplicity of the Mach 1, but I could use either interchangeably. So far I've been liking it with the switch on low gain and asymmetrical clipping.

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Next up is the Stack Melter (Face Melter PCB). The graphics is some clip art--I wanted to use a wholesome theme to contrast the original name that inspired this pedal.

This has nice higher gain tones, like a hot rodded MIAB--and with the gain switch up, is even more over the top. It's a bit noisy in this high-gain mode (I don't know if that's an issue with my build or just inherent in this pedal).

I haven't seen other commercial pedals based on a soft-clipping op-amp sandwiched by two mosfet boosts, but it's a cool circuit--kind of like a box of rock with the middle gain stage replaced with a op-amp. I wonder if this pedal would be more popular if it wasn't associated with a sexist novelty band.


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One thing about the Face Melter PCB: it's got a switch located right between two 1uF caps. That was a pain to solder. I had to use a different tip to even reach the leads without touching the caps, and with that tip had a hard time getting the solder to flow (and I still managed to melt the box caps a bit). I think I got it since the switch is working, but it is an ugly solder blob. If anyone has advice how to approach this better in future builds, I'm all ears.
 
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