Black Eye - Redux

MichaelW

Well-known member
Double dipping build reports today.

After my successful Space Heater build I decided to try building the Black Eye again.

This is a redux but I never posted about the first effort because it never worked. Had no output to begin with, and like my first Space Heater
I was too chicken sh*t to go probing around all that bzzzzzzzzzzzt.

I suspect the same thing as with my Space Heater, there was probably a solder bridge in there and there was a couple of other things I did wrong.
I did not have any straight leg A1M's so I hacked a couple of 90 degree ones but I made them a wee bit too long. Which in turn pushed the board closer to the
top of the enclosure towards the DC jack. Those of you that have built this (or seen the gut shots) know that there's not much clearance to begin with in a 1590BB.
I have a feeling something shorted out in the first one.

So armed with all that "experience" :) I went ahead and ordered some straight leg A1M's when I ordered the replacement board. I still had to hack the B25k tone pot but I made it the same length as the A1M's. Like the Space Heater, I slowed my build process down to half speed, took extra care with each solder joint, used only the minimal amount of solder necessary to get good flow through and build a small dome and quadruple checked my work along the way to make sure I wasn't creating any solder bridges on this tightly packed board.

I also scrubbed the crap out of the populated board with IPA and rinsed liberally in IPA to get any trace of flux off the board. (I skipped this step my first attempt, like with the Space Heater)

The sum of it all is that I have a working build! Wooohooo! Holy crap this thing has a ton of gain!
And not just gain, but rich harmonic gain. Awesome job @vigilante398! Fantastic sounding pedal. Very amp-like and BIG sounding.

It's way more gain than I know what to do with but it sure is a lot of fun! I can actually get a nice low/medium gain sound with the gain knob all the way off and pushing it with a boost pedal. Like the Space Heater it sounds great with the Modus Operandi boost at unity. It doesn't need to be "pushed" as much as boosting it "tightens" up the transients a bit.

I have the same squealing issue that others have reported at higher gain levels (anything higher than noon) if I don't use a buffer in front of this pedal. But since I ALWAYS have a buffer at the beginning of my signal chain it doesn't impact me and I don't plan to do anything about it. If I WERE to address this I'd probably just use one of @PedalPCB's Simple JFet buffers on the input of the board. Those things are so tiny, convenient and sound so transparent, you can tuck them in anywhere.
(@vigilante398 also has a fix on the way for this, btw)

Same rattle can of Blue Hyacinth spray paint I used on the Space Heater build, and same cream knob color scheme. I think I probably need to build up the layers with a few additional coats to smooth out the imperfections of the bare aluminum enclosures in the future. This whole "painting enclosures" thing has been a bit of a learning experience and somewhat frustrating at times. (I have one that I've sanded back like 4 times already because it keeps "crinkling")

I used JJ 12AX7's and plan to leave them in there. They sound great! Plus, I actually have to remove the output jack to get the tube in, so I don't foresee a lot of tube swapping experimentation with this build. I used the ribbon cable suggested by @vigilante398. The pedal gets warm but never really "hot" so I don't see a problem with the proximity of the ribbon cable over the tube.

And again THANK YOU @vigilante398 for sharing these, very cool pedal!

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clean build! good to know you got it all figured out and got it working! really nice color scheme too i wouldnt worry about the "cracks" you really cant tell looks great to me!!
 
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