Solar Flare

This is based on the Robert Keeley 'Fuzz Head', on a board called 'Solar Flare' from Nucleon FX. It has a Rangemaster style circuit followed by distortion stages. It's also got clipping diodes on a switch, and switchable input capacitors to give a bass boost if needed.

Not sure I'm much of a fuzz connoisseur, this sounds pretty similar to other fuzz pedals that I've built. The clipping switch does make a change to the sound...a bit... maybe I'm just not getting all the mojo sounds through the small practice amp that I use.

For the germanium transistor, I went with an AC128k.

I used three clipping diodes - a 1n4148, a 1n270, and a D9K. Probably could have left the 1n4148 off, but I'd already soldered it to the board before trying the other ones with it.

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The enclosure was an old tobacco tin. Don't smoke. You'll get lung cancer. This is a much better use of the tin, now that the tobacco is gone, and the person who smoked it died of lung cancer.

I tried to use a waterslide decal for doing the labels, and after it had been soaking in the water for about a minute, and still hadn't budged off the paper, I realised that I'd actually grabbed some sticker paper, not waterslide. Don't put sticker paper in water. It doesn't work.

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