Timmy's (Tommy III and more)

rmfx

Active member
The Timmy is my favorite overdrive, have had one on more board for at least 10 years. Snagged a v3 from Paul this year which is now the one velcro'd to my board. Such a simple, brilliant pedal.

This weekend I built a pair of them, a Tommy III and a v2 on vero. Vero/v2 is for a friend and his girlfriend handpainted the enclosure, it turned out incredible, will have to commission some more enclosures from her!

While the spaghetti monster that is the vero build is a lot of fun and feels really "handmade", one does really have to appreciate the streamlined simplicity of having PCB mounted pots and the i/o wires in places that make sense.


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For fun I compared all of them. No surprise, they don't sound that different. They can all be made to sound pretty dang similar with some tweaking, if you have a band behind you you'd never be able to tell the difference. LM1458 in the clones. The v3 had a JRC4580DD (odd, never heard of that one in a Timmy), and the v1 has JRC4559D in it. Swapped a 1458 in the v3 for my comparison, left the v1 alone.

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These setting got them all sounding similar (all set to the symmetrical with the least amount of diodes). Keep in mind the v1 and the hand painted have reverse treble/bass controls. The v3 and Tommy III did sound a bit different with controls in same places, but a little tweaking got them super close. Probably component variance, the real Timmy's have 5% resistors, clones are 1%. Didn't scan the real Timmy circuits to check for any variances, don't care too much. All of them sound like a Timmy, I'd play any one of them.
 
What did she use for the black paint? Was it direct onto a powder coated box then clear coated? She is very talented. I can totally see you wanting to commission her for more. Kid's got the knack!
 
What did she use for the black paint? Was it direct onto a powder coated box then clear coated? She is very talented. I can totally see you wanting to commission her for more. Kid's got the knack!
Paint pen for the letters, I believe. It's not powder coated, just spray paint for the base color.
 
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