bobson dugnutt
Active member
This was a fun build! If you remember that La Croix pedal you're already familiar with my wife's handiwork; this one I handed the enclosure off and let her do whatever. She went with a cactus this time and I'm really digging it. It turns out powder coat takes sharpie really well, and it's a super easy way to get some simple line art down! You do have to be careful, since it takes a couple of seconds to dry, but with patience you can pull off some clean and intricate lines with minimal smudging.
Really loving the Phase II! It has "that" phaser sound; really chewy and old-school. Couldn't help but play that Em-A progression from "Breathe." I need to spend some time in a dark room tweaking the trimpots a bit more, but so far it sounds great as-is, especially the lower depth slow swooshing phase sounds.
For anyone reading this looking to build one of these, a few things I wish I had known going into it:
- This is one of those 1/8 watt resistor builds. The 1/4 watt ones work fine, just stand them up on end (see gut shot)
- It's a cramped build. I used to work through each value and solder different parts of the board, but found I make fewer mistakes by populating an entire area, then going in with the soldering iron. It takes longer to populate this way, but the odds of accidentally soldering over an empty pad went down to practically zero.
- The fit into the enclosure is a tight one!! Even after measuring I still ended up redoing the footswitch wiring (which is why it looks sloppy). If I were to build another one of these I would have run some uninsulated leads off of the main PCB sticking straight up, aligned the 3PDT breakout above it, then soldered the breakout from the top.
Definitely adding the Bi-Phase to my todo list once I get through the PCBs I already have laying around
(reading this interview with Mike Beigel got me really hype to take on the full build!)
Really loving the Phase II! It has "that" phaser sound; really chewy and old-school. Couldn't help but play that Em-A progression from "Breathe." I need to spend some time in a dark room tweaking the trimpots a bit more, but so far it sounds great as-is, especially the lower depth slow swooshing phase sounds.
For anyone reading this looking to build one of these, a few things I wish I had known going into it:
- This is one of those 1/8 watt resistor builds. The 1/4 watt ones work fine, just stand them up on end (see gut shot)
- It's a cramped build. I used to work through each value and solder different parts of the board, but found I make fewer mistakes by populating an entire area, then going in with the soldering iron. It takes longer to populate this way, but the odds of accidentally soldering over an empty pad went down to practically zero.
- The fit into the enclosure is a tight one!! Even after measuring I still ended up redoing the footswitch wiring (which is why it looks sloppy). If I were to build another one of these I would have run some uninsulated leads off of the main PCB sticking straight up, aligned the 3PDT breakout above it, then soldered the breakout from the top.
Definitely adding the Bi-Phase to my todo list once I get through the PCBs I already have laying around
(reading this interview with Mike Beigel got me really hype to take on the full build!)
