What do I need to know before I order my first transistors?

jwin615 said:
If these are your first builds, I'd hit the pause button for a second.
Ordering a set of pre-matched transistors for those builds, or sticking to silicon, would be my recommendation. Maybe even asking nicely here and someone would set you up with a pair. Do you have a means/knowledge to measure/match leakage?
I'll echo @MBFX , Ge is a huge pita. So much so that, personally, I'm almost over it. It's almost not worth the financial turmoil and time to me at this point. I would also caution, that if you do go down the Russian Ge road, take notes and ask questions about which ones to order for which circuit. Even then, you may order 40 and find only a few, at best, that hit the needed specs. You can't really trust the published specs on sovcom's listings. Maybe I've just have bad luck but I've bought several lots that all measured significantly lower than published specs. One in particular that measured in single digits hfe or diodes. I'm fairly sure most have been pre sorted/were rejects. This is the case for most Ge transistors today. In other words, a lot of them are useless.
Silicon fuzzes can sounds awesome, it doesn't have to be Ge. And it's way cheaper to get a variety of Si transistors.

TLDR:
Either order from a person/vendor that will sale you measured and matched setd(gain and leakage) or stick to Si for your first couple. It's very easy to waste a significant amount of money and time going deep down the Ge rabbit hole. I say all this because I don't want you, or any other new builders reading this in the future, to get frustrated early in your building career trying to chase the mojo ghost. And to answer your second set of questions regarding other mojo parts, no. Stick to new stock known good parts. You won't hear a tropical fish cap in a cranked fuzz. You will waste extra money and have to deal with the pita of trying to get that capacitor to fit the board/in the enclosure. Again, no need for the added frustration and cost starting out.
That's just like, my opinion man.
Happy building.

Edit:
P.S., I wouldn't trust Small bear to match any transistors at this point in time. I would go to pedal hacker before small bear in this instance.
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Why wouldn’t you trust Small Bear?
I have used their transistors in the past and they worked fine. What problems did you encounter?

Regards

Mark
 
Mark said:
Why wouldn’t you trust Small Bear?
I have used their transistors in the past and they worked fine. What problems did you encounter?

Regards

Mark
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I don’t know his particular reason. But small bear was sold around 2020 i believe and is no longer ran by the same person. Ive had some annoying dealings with them myself, but minor ones. They have been enough though that I only really order from them if its my only option for all of what i need to order at that time.
 
Locrian99 said:
I don’t know his particular reason. But small bear was sold around 2020 i believe and is no longer ran by the same person. Ive had some annoying dealings with them myself, but minor ones. They have been enough though that I only really order from them if its my only option for all of what i need to order at that time.
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Okay fair enough. I have bought matched sets of germanium transistors from them before 2020 and afterwards and the transistors worked well. I don’t know if they were the perfect transistors for the effect, but I was happy with the results.

Regards

Mark
 
Mark said:
Why wouldn’t you trust Small Bear?
I have used their transistors in the past and they worked fine. What problems did you encounter?

Regards

Mark
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I don't really want to rehash it. It's here on the forum.
In short, Synth Cube bought Small Bear. While it's better than that resource for the pedal building community disappearing, I have doubts about their aptitude when it comes to pedal related stuff due to personal experience.
Maybe they have improved over the last year.
 
I like small bear for weird chips that are hard to find elsewhere. But they take forever to ship. They are maybe 100 miles from me and if I place an order with them and with Tayda on the same day in the same hour the Tayda order will get here first. From literally the other side of the planet.
 
falco_femoralis said:
I like small bear for weird chips that are hard to find elsewhere. But they take forever to ship. They are maybe 100 miles from me and if I place an order with them and with Tayda on the same day in the same hour the Tayda order will get here first. From literally the other side of the planet.
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This is my biggest complaint with them. They do have some hard to find stuff sometimes though, also pricing seems high a some stuff.
 
That seems fair criticism. I used Tayda recently and they were very cheap, the postage was cheap and I received them quickly.

I saw a guy in Canada called ThorpeFX selling Ge transistors on Etsy, has anyone used him?

Regards

Mark
 
Mark said:
That seems fair criticism. I used Tayda recently and they were very cheap, the postage was cheap and I received them quickly.

I saw a guy in Canada called ThorpeFX selling Ge transistors on Etsy, has anyone used him?

Regards

Mark
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I have not, I have had good experiences buying lots of 100 from Sovcom, Alexer1 etc on Ebay. Take a few weeks and you'll need a tester, but a pack of 100 for 40$ I ended up with probably 10 sets of choice Fuzz face pairs, and plenty of less than "choice" combo's, and some rangemasters. But there is some variance, I recently had a lot of 100 where there was nothing below 100 hfe, so I suppose there is risk.
 
Nostradoomus said:
just sus out the silicon versions of those pedals and make much more happiness for a fraction of the cost and frustration


^___________^
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Yeah, I hear what you are saying I built a Fuzz Face using 2N3904’s and it sounded brilliant. It was as good as my Fulltone 69 pedal but with a nicer top end.

Regards

Mark
 
Locrian99 said:
I have not, I have had good experiences buying lots of 100 from Sovcom, Alexer1 etc on Ebay. Take a few weeks and you'll need a tester, but a pack of 100 for 40$ I ended up with probably 10 sets of choice Fuzz face pairs, and plenty of less than "choice" combo's, and some rangemasters. But there is some variance, I recently had a lot of 100 where there was nothing below 100 hfe, so I suppose there is risk.
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I have tried this and pedals do become expensive quickly. Over a decade ago I bought AC-128’s and the majority of them were rubbish. I managed to build a very expensive Fuzz Face.

Regards

Mark
 
Mark said:
I have tried this and pedals do become expensive quickly. Over a decade ago I bought AC-128’s and the majority of them were rubbish. I managed to build a very expensive Fuzz Face.

Regards

Mark
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Quite a few of us here have large stashes of germanium transistors and transistor testers. What are you looking to build?
 
I love 60's and 70's fuzz tones. I have bought and built a Dallas Treble booster, Fuzz Faces, Tonebenders and Octave pedals.

I'm trying to build the a Mk1 Tonebender, I have built a Mk2, and a Mk3, and I'm happy how they turned out.

I considered the TB Mk1 too much trouble to make, as I saw so many posts where people weren't happy with their Mk1 due to the Ge transistors, but I'm embarking on this adventure anyway.
I do have some Ge transistors to try in my Tone Vendor board, though I'm still gathering what makes them tick.
it would seem to me Q1 and Q3 have to be leaky to operate, but Q2 is another matter as leakage shouldn't be such a big deal to this transistor provided one is prepared to change the 470K resistor to a lower value.

PedalBuilder, thank you for your kind offer, If you have suitable transistors that are up for the task, I'm interested if I'm not imposing too much.
 
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