Chalumeau w/o Fuzz

falco_femoralis

Active member
Hi all, here's a Chalumeau build. I made this without the fuzz by clipping pins 1 and 8 off the LM386.

Here the PCB is made and I'm beginning to populate the wiring. I went with a diffused yellow LED. I forget which LDR I used but I believe it was one of the Tayda ones. I left the top two pots out for now.
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Holes are drilled. I'm squeezing this into a horizontal 1590b
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I fit the DC jack in between two of the pots and above the circuit board. The prongs have to be this way and I will fit heat shrink over the ground wire so it doesn't contact the circuit board.
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I had to coax the pots into making the board fit the way I want. It was pretty tight, but it'll make sense when you see how it fits with the switch. After this I reflowed the pots' solder joints. I temporarily mounted the board and got an idea of where the LED should be, and I hot glued it to the back of the board.
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Now it's coming together. I feed the switch wires under the board and around to the back of the switch. I wire up the off board pots - I had the foresight to order solder lug style this time. I use a single wire for all the grounds and it took some planning to make it work without making a mess.
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And that's the wiring done! It's a tight fit but it's laid out simply. I would have liked to run more of the wires under the board but there just wasn't room
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And here's the top! I'm experimenting with labels and I think these came out pretty good. I like the 1590b size over the 125b and I'll do whatever I can to use them instead.
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I like the sound. I was looking for something to replace my Low Tide, which I never really bonded with. This thing is just a bit of weird. The Tracking control is interesting - it's an envelope filter that detunes more the more intense the signal is. I played with the pedal briefly to make sure everything was working but I'll have to spend some more time with it. Again, I omitted the fuzz because I'm not fond of the LM386 style distortion and I wanted something that would add a lofi augmentation to my clean and light overdrive sounds.
 
Cool mod. Original (and challenging) layout. Great write-up. I love this sort of build report. Well done! I wasn't interested in this one but the no fuzz mod has me curious.
 
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