Thermionic Deluxe Dual Build (Friedman BE-OD Deluxe)

Fingolfen

Well-known member
I've built a lot of pedals at this point, but I'd never built a PedalPCB board (I'd picked up a few, but they were still in the queue) until I had a friend ask me to build a pedal for their brother. Turns out their brother wanted a Friedman BE-OD Deluxe, and the Thermionic Deluxe seemed to fit the bill - and I didn't have to try and merge two AionFX Tempests together.

Overall I'm really impressed with the quality of the board. It's solid, and it was sort of nice having the values for the components on the silkscreen rather than having to translate R1, R2, etc. Granted that's not going to work for multi-version builds, but for mono builds like this it was pretty awesome.

Low-res - Thermionic BE-OD Deluxe - 01.jpg

The eagle-eyed among you will catch the goof in the bottom board that I noticed in final check before I turned it on.

My only two criticisms of the board as designed are the potentiometer spacing and the lack of stock support for a bi-color channel LED. As you can see in the photo below, if you have the dust covers on, the top row of pots runs into the dust covers of the bottom row. There's plenty of room in the enclosure to either 1) open up the spacing (this would also make soldering the Volume B pot to the board easier as you wouldn't have to thread as tight a needle through the electrolytic capacitors) or 2) reverse the bottom row of pots. Adding the bi-color LED was fairly simple as you could just run an extra wire out of the channel switch, but I wish it had been a stock option.

Low-res - Thermionic BE-OD Deluxe - 02.jpg

For the enclosure I went with an homage to the original using free or licensed fonts. I spent a little time playing around with the trimmer resistors to get the tone where I like it, but I really like the clear difference in channels.

Low-res - Thermionic BE-OD Deluxe - 05.jpg

Full details on the build at my Steggo Studios blog (yes I like dinosaurs!).
 
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Looks great, I built one recently myself, the pot spacing wasn't an issue for me, I do my pots and most of my off-board wiring on the face of the enclosure, so access to the B volume pot wasn't an issue
 
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