Pedal build diary - blow by blow account

SteveF

Philtre said:

BTW - I find the CPC and RS sites a real pain in the butt to navigate and filter. ;-)

Yeah me too - although it got much easier when I knew what I was looking for!  

I think I'm good for now, got a couple of kits and a stock of bits coming.  I should just need some more knobs, jacks and enclosures (will stock up when Tayda does a code) and the transistors, diodes and chips which I'll probably buy as I need them as you suggest, at least til I know what I'm doing.  

After I build the kits and a couple other pedals, I'm interested to knock up a couple of circuits from diagrams and then experiment with different values etc and see what it does to the sound. 

Philtre

SteveF said:

After I build the kits and a couple other pedals, I'm interested to knock up a couple of circuits from diagrams and then experiment with different values etc and see what it does to the sound. 

That's what I originally wanted to do. Might be easiest to choose a simple circuit and use a breadboard.

SteveF

Yeah, I figured that would be the case.  I have a breadboard coming too.  I had planned on starting out with a really simple distortion or boost circuit and tweaking from there. 

aord43

Tantalum caps are good to keep the size down if you don't want to use chunky electrolytics.  I used them for the first time this week (Keeley 4-knob compressor) and it worked fine.  The only potential gotcha is identifying the polarity.

aord43

@Philtre ;
I had a wry chuckle at the comment about reading resistor bands.  Back in the day I could read them no problem and had many common values memorized anyway.  These days I can't read most of them!  I am sure they are smaller than they used to be, with poor contrast colours

Adam_MD

Philtre said:

For me, the important thing is their physical size, especially height, which is why it's always good to read the provided data sheets. A lot of the electrolytics are 11mm in height which can be too tall

That’s why I only buy electrolytics which are 5mm or 7mm tall I ordered some which were way too big when I was starting out and don’t like bending them down over other components.

I filter by brand, voltage, height and capacitance that way you only have a few to choose from.  Once I have parts I like take a note of the part numbers and you can just reorder using that next time without having to search.  If you buy them in bags of 50 or 100 you won’t have to order very often.  

paulnb57

Really appreciate you sharing this build, its inspring me to give it a go...

Philtre

aord43 said:

@Philtre ;
I had a wry chuckle at the comment about reading resistor bands.  Back in the day I could read them no problem and had many common values memorized anyway.  These days I can't read most of them!  I am sure they are smaller than they used to be, with poor contrast colours

My eyesight is bad these days. I need 2x strength reading glasses for normal stuff, and for soldering I plonk on another 2x pair over the top of that pair to create a low-rent bifocal solution. Looks silly as anything but works for me. Also I bought one of these Helix fluorescent daylight lamps from Amazon:



It's big and heavy, but it's built like a tank and its head looks like the Alien's.

Philtre

aord43 said:

Tantalum caps are good to keep the size down if you don't want to use chunky electrolytics.  I used them for the first time this week (Keeley 4-knob compressor) and it worked fine.  The only potential gotcha is identifying the polarity.

Interesting. I might check these out.

Adam_MD

Philtre said:

aord43 said:

Tantalum caps are good to keep the size down if you don't want to use chunky electrolytics.  I used them for the first time this week (Keeley 4-knob compressor) and it worked fine.  The only potential gotcha is identifying the polarity.

Interesting. I might check these out.

The only word of caution I have with tants is make sure you don’t exceed the stated voltage and never install them the wrong way round.  If they fail they go bang.  

FatPete

aord43 said:

@Philtre ;
I had a wry chuckle at the comment about reading resistor bands.  Back in the day I could read them no problem and had many common values memorized anyway.  These days I can't read most of them!  I am sure they are smaller than they used to be, with poor contrast colours

Likewise. My eyes are still pretty good compared to some of my ageing parts but nowadays I'm sure they deliberately use violet-ish brown and brown-ish violet.

I wonder how many of you are stuck with the same mnemonic I was taught (in the early 80s) - non-PC doesn't cover it, offensively racist does though.

While I'm at it, I've recently put together a few pedalparts.co.uk (Fuzzdogs) kits, they're great but they randomly supply a mix of 4 and 5 band resistors. Twists my melon.

Philtre

Adam_MD said:

The only word of caution I have with tants is make sure you don’t exceed the stated voltage and never install them the wrong way round.  If they fail they go bang.  

Oh yes! I want to see that! ;-)

Octafish

That's a great guide there @Philtre . I got into pedal building (mainly use Tagboards schematics and vero) last year and it's highly addictive and I've built some great sounding stuff along the way. If you're into fuzzes you should really check out the DAM Buzzatron - amazing Ge fuzz.  Probably spent £250 or more on bits now, but I've built 30+ pedals and some spend that on one modded tubescreamer .

Philtre

FatPete said:

While I'm at it, I've recently put together a few pedalparts.co.uk (Fuzzdogs) kits, they're great but they randomly supply a mix of 4 and 5 band resistors. Twists my melon.

Would mess with my OCD too.

Philtre

Octafish said:

That's a great guide there @Philtre . I got into pedal building (mainly use Tagboards schematics and vero) last year and it's highly addictive and I've built some great sounding stuff along the way. If you're into fuzzes you should really check out the DAM Buzzatron - amazing Ge fuzz.  Probably spent £250 or more on bits now, but I've built 30+ pedals and some spend that on one modded tubescreamer .

Thanks. £250 is quite a low amount if you factor in the price of enclosures, pots, switches and knobs. I no longer look at how much I've spent on this since December...

Octafish

Looking through my orders it might be closer to £350  .  I did go a bit crazy at first and made a list of about 20 pedals I wanted to build and spent quite a bit in the first 6 months buying a lot of common components in bulk. However now I'm able to build many pedals without buying anything other than a few extra bits. Also a DIY pedal makes a great/cheap present for any guitarist buddies.

Philtre

Part 10

Today's a sunny day so I'm going to solder the connecting wires to the vero board. These wires will connect to the power supply, input and output jacks, the stomp switch, and the potentiometers (pots).

I need to refer to the vero layout so I'll post it here again:




Wire

There are 14 wires to cut and solder to the board.

These layouts tend to stick to a colour scheme of red for 9V+, black for ground, green for input, and blue for output. Then various colours are used to connect to the pots and switches (if any). You don't have to slavishly use the colour scheme but it helps to be consistent. For example, "Density 1 & 2" and "Density 3" look like some sort of light green wire, which I don't have, so I'm going to use white wire for those.

In my first pedal builds I used single-core 0.6mm wire (I think this is 22AWG in American gauge) for these connections. You can get this from Bitsbox here or from other suppliers in bulk.



The nice thing about single-core wire is that it's quite rigid and you can bend it inside the enclosure so it's all neatly tucked away. However, as I found out the hard way, it's also prone to break if you flex it at all. When I was manipulating the wires and routing them inside the enclosure some of the wires snapped off the board and I had to resolder them. So now I use 7/0.2mm multi-stranded wire which you can also get from Bitsbox here or, as I prefer, in multipacks from Rapid here

"7/0.2mm" means that the wire consists of 7 strands of 0.2mm each. These strands ensure that you can bend and flex this stuff all day long and it won't break. Having said that, I do still use single-core wire for the connections in the enclosure between the jack sockets, the DC socket, and the stomp switch. More on that later.


Cutters

I need to cut 14 shortish lengths of coloured mult-strand wire and strip a few mm off each end. I used to use a scalpel and my teeth to do this until I got fed up with that and bought myself some of these:



These strippers work really well and save me a lot of time. They're a bit pricey, but good quality. Amazon have them here  though you might find them cheaper elsewhere.


Stripping, Tinning, and Soldering

Here are the wires, cut and stripped (well, some of them are stripped. I was a bit premature when taking this pic):




Now I'll "tin" the ends of the wires with solder so that it will be easier to solder them to the board and to the various pots and switches. Luckily, Barry the Blob of Blu-tack is on hand to help out:




Then I solder each wire to the board, with Barry's assistance:




And here they are, all soldered to the board:




Now all I need do is connect everything up in the enclosure and we're good to go, right? Well, I could do that but if there's something wrong like a faulty component or bad solder joint then it'll be hard to find. I have a breadboard that I use as a kind of testing bed harness thing, and I'll connect the vero's wires to that for testing before soldering everything up. But before I do that I do want to solder one of the hardware items to three of the wires. This will make things a bit easier, as we'll see later.


SPDT Switch

According to the layout diagram, the three purple wires should be connected to "Sw1", "Sw2" and "Sw3". This refers to the "SPDT" switch mentioned in the layout's rubric. This stands for "Single Pole, Double Throw" which basically means that a single row of connections are connected in two positions. In one position, Sw1 and Sw2 will be connected, and in the other position, Sw2 and Sw3 will be connected. You can see this at the bottom of the schematic where the middle position connects to ground:



This switch needs to be of the mini toggle "On-On" variety.

You can also get "On-Off-On" types. These have a third, middle, position where none of the switch's terminals are connected. But for this circuit we don't need that.

Tayda do good prices on these mini toggles here.

So, I'll solder this on to the three purple wires like so:




That's enough for now. I'm going outside to look at that big orange glowing ball in the sky...

Adam_MD

Philtre said:

Adam_MD said:

The only word of caution I have with tants is make sure you don’t exceed the stated voltage and never install them the wrong way round.  If they fail they go bang.  

Oh yes! I want to see that! ;-)

https://youtu.be/XgKLIvEIl4U

Philtre

@Adam_MD Wow, that's worse than an electrolytic going bang. I wonder how many volts he used?

Adam_MD

Philtre said:

@Adam_MD Wow, that's worse than an electrolytic going bang. I wonder how many volts he used?

I don’t know but there’s a few vids showing similar results on YouTube.  At least with an electrolytic it will work the wrong way round for a while before going pop and certainly not like that.