Fingolfen
Well-known member
I was looking for a fun, out of production, pedal to clone and kind of liked the sound of the Way Huge Geisha Drive. It is a bit niche, but I thought it had some potential. I found a layout on Effects Layouts and proceeded to etch myself a couple of boards. Of course, after that, I find that PedalPCB has their own version as well, so I'm going to try that next and compare.
As you can see from the board above, this is sort of an "intermediate" level build - well, at least in the world of do it yourself etched PCBs. Compared to a conventional manufactured board, these are always more challenging. The grounding on the effects layout board is excellent, though with several locations available to attach in a ground.
Most of the components are fairly garden variety with a few oddball capacitors (like the 270n film capacitor to the left). The only piece that's hard to track down is the original JRC4741D quad op amp. I have some on order, but I'm not sure they're actually going to be the real deal. At this point I'm using LM348Ns, and the sound is pretty much what I'd expect based on the demos of the real thing I've seen so far. I do, however, want to compare once I put in what (is supposed to be) the original op amp.
For the enclosure, I wanted to do something fun and unique. So instead of the Geisha Drive, we now have the Steggo-san Overdrive pedal (with Steggo enjoying his walk through the forest bottom right). The Kanji is supposed to be "dinosaur," but given I speak little Japanese and read no Kanji, it could be "stinky cabbage" for all I know (Google seemed to indicate it was Dinosaur, though). This is certainly one of the best looking pedals I've put together - hopefully it will work well enough to find a semi-permanent place on the board!
A (little) more - including the other board I've populated - at the blog...
As you can see from the board above, this is sort of an "intermediate" level build - well, at least in the world of do it yourself etched PCBs. Compared to a conventional manufactured board, these are always more challenging. The grounding on the effects layout board is excellent, though with several locations available to attach in a ground.
Most of the components are fairly garden variety with a few oddball capacitors (like the 270n film capacitor to the left). The only piece that's hard to track down is the original JRC4741D quad op amp. I have some on order, but I'm not sure they're actually going to be the real deal. At this point I'm using LM348Ns, and the sound is pretty much what I'd expect based on the demos of the real thing I've seen so far. I do, however, want to compare once I put in what (is supposed to be) the original op amp.
For the enclosure, I wanted to do something fun and unique. So instead of the Geisha Drive, we now have the Steggo-san Overdrive pedal (with Steggo enjoying his walk through the forest bottom right). The Kanji is supposed to be "dinosaur," but given I speak little Japanese and read no Kanji, it could be "stinky cabbage" for all I know (Google seemed to indicate it was Dinosaur, though). This is certainly one of the best looking pedals I've put together - hopefully it will work well enough to find a semi-permanent place on the board!
A (little) more - including the other board I've populated - at the blog...
