MBP Blue Steele

Locrian99

Well-known member
Build Rating
4.00 star(s)
Another overdrive added to my growing overdrive collection.

So this was my first madbeans build. No went with this one because it had the switch on board mainly.

I get this in the mail pop it open and I’ve got Ben stiller as Zoolander looking at me.

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Just kind of surprised me.

Anyways on to the build…

I didn’t feel like this build flowed as well as most of the other pcb builds I’ve done. I definitely missed having the values on the board rather than r1, c12 etc. Though I can see the value in having it that way for modding etc. Also component placement on the board seemed a bit all over the place to me.

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Got it all together though. Verified it was working. Sounded pretty good, had been reading the boneyard post prior to building this so decided I should do the biasing. My 4.7k ended biasing out to a 7.5 to get the collector close to vref (ended up being 12mv, 8.2k was -18mv, decided I didn’t want to do a series and it sounded pretty good). I did notice I got some whine if I maxed out the tone knob, volume and gain at the same time. Not that I would ever do that. But was hoping it would go away once boxed but nope it’s still there.
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Decided for an enclosure to just go simple. It’s blue with cheap tayda blue cupcake knobs and a purple led.

Wiring in the box was a bit of a challenge. Not a lot of room at the top, don’t think I messed up my drill template. I would for sure if I had to do this again set the pots a little lower on the face and the jacks a lower on the side to give just a little more room. But it worked was just tight!





Pedal sounds great other than that whine at the weird setting. Hoping though there’s a waza boneyard version of the cobalt in the future I’ll for sure build that to compare


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Very nice build! MBP has some really cool projects. They may have a slightly “messier” layout, but I feel like having to actively triple check values against BOM is a worthwhile lesson in patience. Plus having the component numbers on the board helps in troubleshooting with the schematic. Get yourself a vfe board when they come available, now there is some fun. Chuck has a 4 post series on the BD-2 mods. No PCB, but throwing a couple toggles in isn’t to hard. https://forum.pedalpcb.com/threads/this-week-on-the-breadboard-blues-driver-bd-2-bd-2w-part-1.7390/
 
It's always a bit of an adjustment building a non PedalPCB board for me. I think we've gotten pretty spoiled by the little things @Robert does with his layouts that makes things so convenient, like silkscreened values, plenty of ground pads, and little things like polarity all facing the same way across the board. I have to stop and look to see which way an electrolytic goes when building an MPB board because it's as you said, kinda all over the place. Different design philosophies I guess. Having said that, there's lots of cool projects and the boards are all high quality. Great looking build!
 
I thought about putting papa Smurf in there
It's always a bit of an adjustment building a non PedalPCB board for me. I think we've gotten pretty spoiled by the little things @Robert does with his layouts that makes things so convenient, like silkscreened values, plenty of ground pads, and little things like polarity all facing the same way across the board. I have to stop and look to see which way an electrolytic goes when building an MPB board because it's as you said, kinda all over the place. Different design philosophies I guess. Having said that, there's lots of cool projects and the boards are all high quality. Great looking build!
The kompromat project is on my list at some point. Came back in stock right after I ordered this guy.
 
Very nice build! MBP has some really cool projects. They may have a slightly “messier” layout, but I feel like having to actively triple check values against BOM is a worthwhile lesson in patience. Plus having the component numbers on the board helps in troubleshooting with the schematic. Get yourself a vfe board when they come available, now there is some fun. Chuck has a 4 post series on the BD-2 mods. No PCB, but throwing a couple toggles in isn’t to hard. https://forum.pedalpcb.com/threads/this-week-on-the-breadboard-blues-driver-bd-2-bd-2w-part-1.7390/
Yea I read through that. Used a small part of it in building this. I didn’t want to deal with the off board toggles at least initially I may grab a cobalt and do so a bit later on.
 
Oh how cool. I have that board, I didn’t realize Zoolander was on it. I’m gonna try Chuck D.Bones’ mods on mine. Yes the schematics aren’t the same, but I can translate.
 
Oh how cool. I have that board, I didn’t realize Zoolander was on it. I’m gonna try Chuck D.Bones’ mods on mine. Yes the schematics aren’t the same, but I can translate.
Yea it wasn’t hard figuring out which part was which comparing the schematics. The fat switch is there, I did the biasing thing on mine. I also did the keeley diode mods which are listed in the build docs. Use 1n4002’s and jumper one of them. I didn’t try without that mod though. I didn’t feel like there was a lot of difference other than the other switch. I may rip this out at some point and try adding the other switch more than likely though I’d just build a cobalt drive and mod it all out.
 
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