Thor

Category: Pedals

This is another Runoffgroove project, designed to sound like a Marshall Super Lead. They have a more recent schematic called the Thunderbird, but it has way more components and looks much more complicated, so I've gone for the basic one for now. The Thor has more of those old J201 and 2n5457 transistors that are hard to source though.

Another benefit to the Thor is that my kid is obsessed with Viking mythology (and also Greek/Roman/Egyptian mythology, but Vikings are right up there). As he will be using the pedal, any Viking link is a plus.

The circuit building went pretty smoothly, but I really messed up the enclosure layout - I put in an internal battery at the bottom, followed by the jack, which means the stomp switch is mounted to close to the top of the pedal for my liking. The trapezoid shaped Hammond enclosure looks awesome though.

For finishing, I tried some transparent sticky paper that can be printed on the inkjet. Unfortunately that doesn't really work on a dark blue background - the printer can't print white, so anything that is meant to be white is left transparent, which become blue when you stick it on. So that idea got scrapped.

I've ended up printing onto photo paper, and gluing it on. It isn't going to be a particularly long term solution, but for now it looks good. I can always redo the finish later by just peeling it off.

To go with the Viking theme, I learned a bit of Icelandic, which is as close as you can get to the old language, then converted the Icelandic characters into runes using info on this rune site. The bright and bottom boost switches are the words for 'lightning' and 'thunder', and the gain and volume are what I hope are reasonable translations. The rune at the bottom says 'Thor'.

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