Solar Flare
5 November 2018
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.
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.