Kay F-1 Fuzz Tone

[Ratimus]

Here's a Kay F-1 Fuzz Tone I put together on perfboard. In addition to the standard Tone control, it's got Fuzz (pregain), Level, and Body (input cap, like the Dung Beetle) controls. One toggle turns off the octave, the other selects between a low-pass or mid scoop for the tone control. I also added a volume recovery stage on the output. The octave on this thing is unreal, and when you scoop the mids it totally jumps out at you.

The finish is acrylics thinned with water. This was my first attempt at this style of finish and I was totally skeptical that it would work. I thought I thinned the paint down a bit too much because I had a pretty significant "surface tension" dome on top, but it dried after a few hours. I gave it 3 coats of 2x gloss after letting it dry completely. I'll probably do more like this.

 

[Mcknib]

Frank Fritz
Likes it!



And so do I, nice!

 

[Chuck D. Bones]

Very cool paint job! I'm going to have to try that. Is the base coat purple?

Would you care to share the schematic, showing your mods?

 

[Ratimus]

Very cool paint job! I'm going to have to try that. Is the base coat purple?

Would you care to share the schematic, showing your mods?

Thanks! It's actually a gray enclosure that I sanded at 400 grit to get a good toothy surface for the paint to grip, and then purple was the first and most prominent color I added, along with orange, blue, and green. I saw your Harmonic Percolator build and it served as inspiration when I was looking for tips about swirl painting, so thanks for that.

I'll see if I can dig up my schematic and put it in a followup post.

 

[Ratimus]

So here is the schematic for the tone control mod, which goes to an SPDT and then into a variant of an LPB-1. I'm also sharing the layout I did since it shows the octave switch (which is dead simple: ground the base of Q4 so it goes into cutoff and the rest of the circuit forgets it's there). I did the layout on my laptop while consulting the stock schematic on my phone, so I don't have a single complete schematic. I can draw one if anybody needs it, but hopefully my layout is easy enough to decipher.

EDIT TO ADD: the schematic is a lie; the tone pot should be a 50k log, not 250k.

 

[Chuck D. Bones]

Thanks, Man. I see what you did.