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Ten years ago I built my first pedal, a Germanium ESV fuzz. I love it. I used it on a record just last week and it sounded great. Today, I tried using it and found that I got no signal passing when the pedal was enabled. I resoldered everything, ran lots of tests and finally determined that the problem was in one of the germanium transistors. The pedal worked absolutely fine when swapping in a test silicon transistor.

What would cause a germanium transistor to go bad? Is there anything that would make it actually stop working out of nowhere? Should I simply replace the part? Could it be a dead lead and if so is it possible to replace one?

Almost all Ge transistors nowadays are NOS, meaning they're old. Failures do happen. I would recommend replacing the transistors and seeing where you are. It's possible that there is an issue elsewhere, like perhaps the footswitch. Since those are mechanical, and will inherently wear out, I wouldn't rule it out completely. However, it should be somewhere in the tens of thousands of cycles, something like 50k typically, so don't worry about it just yet.

The transistors are where I would focus first, and take it from there. If you send an email to sales@buildyourownclone.com, and ask for a pack of transistors for the ESV Fuzz, we can get you set up with tested Q values, just let us know which transistors you have. They're $10 ea.

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The tone is in my hands?!
Email: nick@buildyourownclone.com