ragingben

Hey guys,

I just wanted to share my newest build.



It's a clean boost, based on a NE5532 opamp rather than a mosfet as a lot of the boosters available tend to use. In this way it is more like a Way Huge Angry Troll than anything else. It uses a charge pump to boost the 9v input to around 17v so there is a decent amount of headroom to boost the level without clipping. There's a trimmer on the inside so that you can set the gain between around +9dB to +35dB to suit your tastes and the pickups your using, and then the 'booster' control adjusts the output level.

It sounds great with the boost set at around 2 o'clock into a clean amp (unity is around 10 with the trimmer set up as it is in my one), and makes a great boost for fattening up my lead sound at any point from 2 onwards, taking the Bad Monkey off the board that I was using for this purpose. As I like using it for both of these things I really need a second level control and footswitch to change between clean and dirty levels. It defiently has a different vibe to the mosfet boosters (one complaint with opamps as boosters is they can sound sterile and cold), but to me it sounds pretty warm and has a lot of clarity. I'll try and get as sound clip up at some point.

Thanks for looking! Schematics and vero etc can be found here.

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whoomit

It's a pretty little thing that.

ragingben

Thanks

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Telecaster7

Lovin' the design

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ragingben

Thanks, I'm getting clear vinyl stickers these days and sticking them on to powder coated enclosures, it keeps the price down for the ones I build to sell, and cuts out the evenings of spraying that drive my girlfriend crazy!

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Telecaster7

Oh man the spraying. I've been spraying a batch today and yesterday. It's hell.

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ragingben

Haha yeah it can be can't it! I do enjoy spraying, but I hate it when you mess one up and have to sand it back down and start again. When I added up the cost of the primer, laquer, base colour, gradient colour and waterslip paper I was using on my previous designs it just became obvious I couldn't justify it, although they did look prettier. The problem I have with spraying my own is that ultimately I found it really hard to get a finish hard enough that it doesn't chip.

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Telecaster7

Yeah I've had to do a few sand backs, that hurts. So far mine seem fairly hard, but I haven't field tested any properly yet. I dread the day I do... But I guess then I get to figure out a new way of doing things, which is half the fun.

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ragingben

Yeah, I think by spraying you can get them hard enough, but not indestructible.

The worst spraying experience I have had is I was building a batch of 5 pedals and was spraying them late at night after the girlfriend was in bed. Got back from the pub after having a few beers on a saturday night and decided to laquer the lot of them at 1 in the morning. I somehow managed to melt the paint off with the laquer (holding the can too close for too long I expect!) and had to sand the lot down and start again the next morning with a hang over!

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Telecaster7

Oh man that would suck! This batch has been pretty easy so far, but it's 9 pedals so it's a lot of spraying, and a lot of checking. It's too easy to become complacent when you have so many to examine.

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ragingben

That is a fair sized batch, you must be going through a ton of paints! What are you building?

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Telecaster7

A mate and I are doing a batch of Maestro fuzz clones, mostly as a starter project. We've made stuff before but never to a selling quality, so we're just trying to do these as well as we can and see where it takes us. Luckily we're just doing a pretty simple one colour design but so far we're down one can with a bit more spraying to go. So far it's all going pretty well though, the circuit sounds phenomenal and the mockup I did earlier looks great so we're nearly there.

Also the reason we're doing 9 is to capitalise on all of our guitarist friends who have bemoaned the fact they don't have a fuzz they like, so we're selling a few to them and hoping to sell a few to non-friends too.

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ragingben

Sounds great, good luck with it. Put some photos up when your done

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