Available soon: Bodhizafa analog reverb

pricklyrobot said:
Any other good brands or sites to check out for tanks?

Previously, I’d just looked at Amplified Parts. And I’ve now had a look at Mojotone.
Seems like a pretty good assortment between those two, but I’m always on the lookout for good resources to bookmark 👍
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A good resource for identifying vintage Gibbs tanks is https://surfguitar101.com/forums/topic/32671/
Finding a vintage 8 ohm tank is still kinda hard/expensive though. Also I want to try one of those vintage folded line tanks someday but I think they're mostly high impedance.
 
jubal81 said:
Psionic Audio is probably my favorite "grumpy dude repairs tube amps" YouTube channels.

I found this video of him complaining about new production tanks. He says his go-to is the Mojotone medium decay.

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What doesn't he complain about? :)
I'm sure he's right but jeez it gets tiring when every single piece of gear made after 1979 is somehow inferior to the good ole days...

I can't believe we have had vehicles bouncing around on Mars and we can restore hearing to deaf people but somehow we haven't been able to top vintage music gear made of two springs, magnets and crappy transistors.
 
The Mojotones don't seem to really be available in the EU, a british store has that one tank but it's sold out, and I think it would come out to around double what an Accutronics one would cost me, so I'll probably just go with the Accutronics. TAD or MOD are also possibly options, MOD seems too dark, not sure about TAD.

I'm putting together a Tayda order (probably some time next week), I know the boards won't get here until a long time (US - EU shipping is notoriously slow, or at least it can take a long time), but I probably won't make another order for a while if I can avoid it. I guess I don't need anything else for this apart from the 1/4 watt resistors and caps in the list on the previous page, jacks, knobs, enclosure and a momentary SPST footswitch?
 
Fama said:
I guess I don't need anything else for this apart from the 1/4 watt resistors and caps in the list on the previous page, jacks, knobs, enclosure and a momentary SPST footswitch?
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Yup, plus the tank and RCA cables. I ordered some RCA jacks and made my own cables with some Mogami cable I had from making pedalboard connectors.

The two 1/4 watt resistors are the current limiting resistors for the LEDs. I left those through hole so people can adjust those values for brightness. I use 1K resistors for that.

The RCA jacks for the pedal enclosure must be isolated with plastic washers or you'll get ground loop hum. The hole size in the Tayda template I made should work with flat washers, but I needed slightly bigger holes than that for the hardware store isolation washers I used.
 
One interesting thing Lyle said in that video is he said he'll sometimes raise the cutoff frequency going into tanks to remove more bass frequencies for modern tanks.

It stood out to me because I used the same cutoff frequency as the 6G15, but I found that "double filtering" with the same frequency cutoff made a noticeable improvement.

You see that in the schematic with a 2n2/220K at the mosfet gate and a 4n7/100K pot on the dwell control.

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I just remembered one other difference between the Mod and Mojotone tanks I've got. Obviously it's a small sample size, so it may not apply broadly, but the Mod tank is WAY more susceptible to crash and vibration. Just tapping lightly on it will make noise. With the Mojo tank, I have to hit it pretty hard to get it to crash. There's no noise from it until it's hit hard enough to crash.

I don't want to say all MOD tanks perform that way, but mine do.

It also occurred to me that could be a reason a company that makes stompboxes with reverb tanks inside would want a custom tank.
 
jubal81 said:
I just remembered one other difference between the Mod and Mojotone tanks I've got. Obviously it's a small sample size, so it may not apply broadly, but the Mod tank is WAY more susceptible to crash and vibration. Just tapping lightly on it will make noise. With the Mojo tank, I have to hit it pretty hard to get it to crash. There's no noise from it until it's hit hard enough to crash.

I don't want to say all MOD tanks perform that way, but mine do.

It also occurred to me that could be a reason a company that makes stompboxes with reverb tanks inside would want a custom tank.
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I think the main reason for Surfy Industries to have a custom tank was the excessively long decay in modern tanks, which makes the reverb wash out.
Both my Accutronics and the MOD tank I sold crash easily but It's not an issue for me cause I have foam dampening the springs but maybe their custom tank is sturdier.
I know the pan is suspended by springs in a real Fender tank and it's a vertical model.
 
Fired right up and working perfectly. I'd bought some "synth" type knobs from LMS, but they basically crumbled into dust when I screwed them on. Saucers ain't terrible on this, anyway.

I've got the build doc mostly finished already. The plan is to package up the kits and get them in the mail Monday or Tuesday.

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I bought the recommended tank for this project without thinking about how I was going to house it. I built my guitar/bass speaker cabinet (1x15) about 30 years ago with my grandfather. It’s the only one I’ve ever had besides some small combo amps. Turns out that the tank fits the floor of the cab to the millimeter in its tolex bag. Surf is one of my favorite types of genre music, and my guitar for the last decade has been a Mosrite. Digital reverbs have been the biggest letdown of anything I’ve built. I have built the spaceman mini spring reverb and it’s ok, but noisy, and lacking a lot of everything. It’s been a VERY long time since a project has gotten me this excited. Thank you for your work on this.
 
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Betty Wont said:
I bought the recommended tank for this project without thinking about how I was going to house it. I built my guitar/bass speaker cabinet (1x15) about 30 years ago with my grandfather. It’s the only one I’ve ever had besides some small combo amps. Turns out that the tank fits the floor of the cab to the millimeter in its tolex bag. Surf is one of my favorite types of genre music, and my guitar for the last decade has been a Mosrite. Digital reverbs have been the biggest letdown of anything I’ve built. I have built the spaceman mini spring reverb and it’s ok, but noisy, and lacking a lot of everything. It’s been a VERY long time since a project has gotten me this excited. Thank you for your work on this.
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Where do you get the tolex bag for the spring pan? Mine came without it.
I built my Surfybear kit in an old school toolbox:

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Betty Wont said:
I bought the recommended tank for this project without thinking about how I was going to house it. I built my guitar/bass speaker cabinet (1x15) about 30 years ago with my grandfather. It’s the only one I’ve ever had besides some small combo amps. Turns out that the tank fits the floor of the cab to the millimeter in its tolex bag. Surf is one of my favorite types of genre music, and my guitar for the last decade has been a Mosrite. Digital reverbs have been the biggest letdown of anything I’ve built. I have built the spaceman mini spring reverb and it’s ok, but noisy, and lacking a lot of everything. It’s been a VERY long time since a project has gotten me this excited. Thank you for your work on this.
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Awesome!

I can't wait till you get to fire it up. I'm a reverb junkie, too. The mix knob switching was a main design goal for me. You can go from rock'n'roll level reverb to big boing and back - and I'm not gonna need a bypass switch.

Don't be afraid to use the tone knob. At the more extreme settings it really helps to be able to knock back the brightness a bit.
 
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