Fingolfen
Well-known member
- Build Rating
I haven't built too many modulation effects recently, so I figured it was time to change that. The EQD Space Spiral seems to have a fair amount of range in what it can do (I mean, it's got six knobs, right?), so I picked up the Dark Rift Delay board and had at it!
As with most of the PedalPCB builds, the board is tightly laid out with all of the components in rows. Generally I love this sort of layout because it makes soldering groups of resistors and capacitors much easier. This one even has ICs between the major passive component rows, which normally makes assembly even easier, but there is one glaring issue with the layout of this particular board - the spaces for several of the film capacitors are smaller than they should be. The only good 1μF and 330nF film capacitors I've been able to find are 3.5mm wide, not the 2.5mm wide provided on the silkscreen. On a loosely packed board, or if the component is at the end of a row, the 1mm difference in width wouldn't have mattered, but being tightly packed as they were, it made actually fitting the capacitors on the board difficult without having them extend above the height of the neighboring capacitors.
So, to make everything work I first had to bend all of the legs of the 1μF caps to get them to into their allotted portions of the board. For the run of four capacitors on the left hand side of the board, I ended up using Panasonic 100nF capacitors (which are raised above the level of the PCB on their leads) so everything would fit. The 100μF electrolytic capacitors I had available were a bit large in diameter as well, but one fit fine as there was plenty of room to accommodate the larger footprint, and the other one I could just bend over the resistors.
Apart from the challenge fitting the capacitors onto the board, the rest of the build was very straightforward. The resistors are all 1/4W 1% metal film (a mix of Yageo and KOA Speer), the film capacitors are all WIMA and KEMET, the electrolytic capacitors are Nichicon. The ICs came from a variety of sources, but all of them are socketed. For the wiring, I'm following my more recent practice of having separate ground wires from the board to the jacks, and as this is a delay pedal, I wanted to make sure that the input and output wires could run along the edges of the enclosure. I also moved the location of the LED so there would be more room for art on the front of the enclosure.
As to the art, it's been a while, but this is another awesome dinosaur painted by my lovely wife ADK! I carried the blue from the dinosaur through to the top of the enclosure. Because there are six controls, I decided to go with smaller knobs as otherwise they'd completely overwhelm the design.
With all of the knobs, it is possible to get an extremely wide array of sounds from this effect. I've managed to match the sounds from the EQD site using their settings, so I know the pedal is functioning properly. If the repeats knob goes past around 3:00, the pedal will self oscillate. Ultimately this pedal does several modulation effects well, but getting it dialed in takes a bit of trial and error. Of course, that's half the fun!
In the final analysis I gave this build four out of five stars because of the issues with the spacing for the 1μF and 330nF film capacitors. There's plenty of room in the enclosure to have made this board just a bit bigger and provided that extra millimeter of space for those caps, but other than that the pedal is amazing!
A bit more at the blog: https://steggostudios.blogspot.com/2022/12/tone-in-spaaaaccce-cloning-eqd-space.html
As with most of the PedalPCB builds, the board is tightly laid out with all of the components in rows. Generally I love this sort of layout because it makes soldering groups of resistors and capacitors much easier. This one even has ICs between the major passive component rows, which normally makes assembly even easier, but there is one glaring issue with the layout of this particular board - the spaces for several of the film capacitors are smaller than they should be. The only good 1μF and 330nF film capacitors I've been able to find are 3.5mm wide, not the 2.5mm wide provided on the silkscreen. On a loosely packed board, or if the component is at the end of a row, the 1mm difference in width wouldn't have mattered, but being tightly packed as they were, it made actually fitting the capacitors on the board difficult without having them extend above the height of the neighboring capacitors.
So, to make everything work I first had to bend all of the legs of the 1μF caps to get them to into their allotted portions of the board. For the run of four capacitors on the left hand side of the board, I ended up using Panasonic 100nF capacitors (which are raised above the level of the PCB on their leads) so everything would fit. The 100μF electrolytic capacitors I had available were a bit large in diameter as well, but one fit fine as there was plenty of room to accommodate the larger footprint, and the other one I could just bend over the resistors.
Apart from the challenge fitting the capacitors onto the board, the rest of the build was very straightforward. The resistors are all 1/4W 1% metal film (a mix of Yageo and KOA Speer), the film capacitors are all WIMA and KEMET, the electrolytic capacitors are Nichicon. The ICs came from a variety of sources, but all of them are socketed. For the wiring, I'm following my more recent practice of having separate ground wires from the board to the jacks, and as this is a delay pedal, I wanted to make sure that the input and output wires could run along the edges of the enclosure. I also moved the location of the LED so there would be more room for art on the front of the enclosure.
As to the art, it's been a while, but this is another awesome dinosaur painted by my lovely wife ADK! I carried the blue from the dinosaur through to the top of the enclosure. Because there are six controls, I decided to go with smaller knobs as otherwise they'd completely overwhelm the design.
With all of the knobs, it is possible to get an extremely wide array of sounds from this effect. I've managed to match the sounds from the EQD site using their settings, so I know the pedal is functioning properly. If the repeats knob goes past around 3:00, the pedal will self oscillate. Ultimately this pedal does several modulation effects well, but getting it dialed in takes a bit of trial and error. Of course, that's half the fun!
In the final analysis I gave this build four out of five stars because of the issues with the spacing for the 1μF and 330nF film capacitors. There's plenty of room in the enclosure to have made this board just a bit bigger and provided that extra millimeter of space for those caps, but other than that the pedal is amazing!
A bit more at the blog: https://steggostudios.blogspot.com/2022/12/tone-in-spaaaaccce-cloning-eqd-space.html
