Build Your Own Clone Message Board

I just recently finished a slightly modified Guv 'nor (Chancellor) pedal, with sockets placed in the locations for the extra 10n capacitor as well as for standard 1K resistor, in order to facilitate adding or subtracting the frequency roll off mod. You can see the sockets in the upper right hand corner of the board. The extra 10n cap and 2.2K resistor for the mod are in a small plastic bag taped to the inside surface of the bottom plate.



Second is a pedal I finished a couple days before building the Chancellor, named "Clean Dirt." After months of conceptualizing, laying out, testing and building with some fails along the way, I finally finished the combo build using 4 GuitarPCB boards – GBOF, Paramix, Rototone and 3PDT switch PCB’s. The final result is a dirt pedal that blends in clean signal. I realized near the end of the project that I pretty much build a Klon like pedal with greater distortion ability. The concept was developed a few years ago when I read an interview with EVH in a guitar magazine and discovered that for live performances he used a blendable Y-cable setup with clean and dirty amps, which could then be blended any way he felt suited for the live situation and particular song.

For the “Dirt” I decided to build a modified Electra/Trotsky drive. I breadboarded it with all of the concepts I wanted to employ and came up with my final design. I transferred the circuit to veroboard and could not get the thing working after a couple of hours of testing. Fortunately I had a left over GBOF board (allows building of several simple circuits such as the electra) and built the electra/trotsky style distortion circuit on that board and then tested it with success. I incorporated a Rototone board off the main GBOF board to be able to switch between 4 different clipping diode pairs. This was placed at the location reserved for the first of two clipping diodes and therefore allowed for 4 different styles of “dirt.” In the standard location for the second clipping diode, I placed a single switched diode to accomplish asymmetrical clipping if so desired. To add a clean signal to blend with the dirt, I decided to use a Paramix board that blends clean with dirty signal. The dirt circuit schematic is below and the GBOF board layout is below the schematic. Note that in the schematic diagram D1-4 represents the first diode in the 4 diode pairs and D5-8 represents the second diode of the diode pair.





Exterior and Interior pictures of the final build.

Wow! What a colossal undertaking that must have been! Congratulations on 2 very exceptional builds!

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“To know, and not to do, is not to know”

Most impressive!

BTW, I have a "Governator", too! Took a somewhat different philosophical approach to the name, however:

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“My favorite programming language is SOLDER” - Bob Pease (RIP)

My Website * My Musical Gear * My DIY Pedals: Pg.1 - Pg.2

Daggum, BigO! Sweet!
~Troy

Haha! Like yours too, DVM!

Nice work, that's an impressive bit of enclosure stuffing! If you do more of this kind of thing in the future, you can make a little more space with Lumberg jacks. Pretty high quality, too. Of course, a lot of people do a build like that and then decide NEVER to do anything like it in the future.

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Scott

My band, Austin Hollow

Awesome from concept, to execution. That EVH part was inspiring, informative and a great call by you. Congratulations.

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Everyone likes sausage. Nobody wants to see how it's made.

A few years ago I built a tremolo pedal with this theme, the "Tremolator."

I already have plans for another combo build using 5 boards, but in a larger enclosure. I am taking some time off from pedal building, though, after I currently finish repairing a previous build that had some problems.

Proof positive that great minds think alike!

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“My favorite programming language is SOLDER” - Bob Pease (RIP)

My Website * My Musical Gear * My DIY Pedals: Pg.1 - Pg.2