A few things:
1.) Thanks to
@finebyfine for the crash course in ground fills!
2.) Thanks to
@PedalPCB for giving me the inspiration to even want to do my own boards
3.) Thanks to the good natured ball-busting of
@Harry Klippton and
@thewintersoldier and
@thesmokingman and
@Stickman393 for helping me try and step my game up at all
4.) Special thanks to
@thewintersoldier for getting me back to basics and what makes a circuit tick rather than letting me reinvent the Fuzz Factory
5.) Thanks to
@fig for being an all-around great guy and for instilling a spirit of contests and giveaways here.
I’ve decided to break up my Universal Board idea. When I went to revise it, it was just too busy, with added jumpers and just not enough real estate to house my revised I/O scheme.
So I’ve decided to call these new board the Enhanced series. Classic circuits with small enhancements. First up is the Enhanced Fuzz Face, the basis for “The Fuzz”, which is the Fuzz 2022 giveaway circuit:
It has a few tweaks on the classic circuit:
1.) The simple control set of Fuzz and Volume is expanded to include a Pre-Gain, which I’ve included on all my fuzzes.
2.) There is a slot for a series resistor off the output of the Pre-Gain. This does 2 things: It makes it so that when Pre-Gain is full up, there is a small targeted resistance to kill hum and other noise and it interacts with:
3.) The cap from base to ground of Q1. This is a trick borrowed from the MK II Tonebender. Here it is MUCH smaller than on the MK II, as we simply want it to form a high pass filter with the series fixed resistor off of the Pre-Gain. It can be set to not mess with the treble content of the pedal and simply filter out RF and other noise.
4.) Dedicated slots for B-C caps on both transistors, if needed.
5.) Dedicated a lot for a feedback bypass cap. With a higher gain Fuzz Face, this is critical for squelching noise and oscillation.
6.) Q2 has a bias trimmer and an output/Mids trimmer.
7.) Dedicated slot for a resistor in series with the wiper of the Fuzz pot and the emitter cap. Another way to limit the max range of the pot and mimic the “Turn the fuzz control down” method of eliminating fizziness and noise in higher gain units.
8.) Lastly, parallel slots for emitter caps. Sometimes you want more than 6.8 uf and less than 10 uf or you simply want something like 15 uf from modern values.
GE transistors, I don’t remember where they came form( probably small bear a while ago) or why I even got them. And I’m not even sure what to build with them( a fuzz of course.)
