Jimmy:
Thanks for that info. A moderators opinion would be helpful for more expertise.
All I can speak of is from my own experience with this beast. When I first built it, I had an intermittent output level. The output would drop about half after a few minutes. So I began the troubleshooting and researching "project". ( actually like this part about building pedals.)
Standard stuff, checking voltages, solder joints, etc. When I removed the diodes WOW!. Volume increased dramatically. I put sockets in the PCB where the diodes go and found really very little difference in tone with or without diodes. Just a lot more output volume. With the sockets in, it was easy to experiment with different diode combinations. Silicon gives much more output as well. I am no electronics guru but I guess this is due to the higher signal voltage the diode passes before shorting signal to ground. Silicon is ~ .5 where germanium is ~.2. So you are passing twice as much signal to the output gain stage before the diode shorts the signal to ground. It seems to me there is so much saturation from the transistor gain stages before it even hits the diodes, that their tonal effect is minimized.
I tried one silicon and 1 germanium diode which is nice. I also put a potentiometer in series with one of the germanium pair and "tweaked" the value until I liked the result. I think it ended up being ~ 20k Ohms. This gave me the output I wanted and hit a sweet spot tonally. Unity gain through the pedal is about 11:00 on the Balance knob now where before it was near maximum.
The other issue I had was trying to get the transistor voltages to what was considered "normal" from various builders and internet posters. So I bought a new set of transistors from Small Bear that had gains between 170 ~ 200 ( as opposed to the originals which were in the 300 range for gain). This didn't have much effect. I finally came across a respected builder of a Superfuzz clone, and looked at their schematic. Particularly the octave circuit. BINGo! When Univox inserted a trimmer in this part of the later circuit design , it just added to the resistance of the octave pair's bases to ground. The trimmer added an additional 5k Ohms! Maybe not a big deal, but when I swapped the 22k resistors for 17k resistors (well 16.9 metal film) the transistor voltages got to where It seems they should be. Using a balanced gain transistor pair here also brought the octave out much more. It also eliminated the harsh compression I was getting with higher output pickups and increased the sensitivity of the Expander knob.
I'm not sure if this is your issue or not, but if it isn't much trouble it is fun to experiment with. I would be very interested in your opinion of the tone of the Superfuzz with and without diodes. I have for all intent and purposes a cloned Superfuzz circuit with the addition of a 20k resistor in series with one of the clipping diodes causing asymmetry. It sounds really good to me