Long Live the King (of Tone)!

Here's a recent project that I had a minor initial issue with, but is quickly turning in to one of my favorite pedals. This is The Knight of Tone from PCB Guitar Mania. The board is based on the King of Tone, another boutique pedal that is extremely popular. As with most out of production boutique pedals (edit - turns out it is still in production, but with a 3 year waiting list - yikes!), this one is now fairly expensive - in the $700 to $800 range for originals. Rather than sourcing my own parts, I ended up picking up the full kit from Das Musikding. You can get it with or without an enclosure, and the enclosure can be drilled or not. I went ahead and picked up a drilled enclosure and the whole thing cost me €55 - or about $65 at today's exchange rate. Not a bad savings!

One of the cool aspects of the Knight of Tone is it combines two pedals into one board and enclosure. The original King of Tone essentially combined two Bluesbreaker overdrive pedals into one unit, but added options for boost and distortion on each side. The Knight of Tone moves the switches to the outside of the unit and makes a few other modifications for convenience.

In effect this means you now have two pedals in one and you can run one, the other, or both. You can have essentially any combination of boost, overdrive, and distortion in either order with adjustable Gain, Presence, Tone, and Volume on each side independently. Beyond essentially getting two great sounding pedals in one, you have a very amazing tapestry of sounds available 

I built my version pretty much out of the box, with a few slight modifications. The only functional modification I made was changing out the diodes provided in the kit with some diodes more faithful to the original pedal (and yes, that means my overall cost went up by about $8 to $10!). The original Knight of Tone used MA856 and 1S1588 diodes which are long out of production. I found a reputable source for diodes in the Netherlands and ended up getting MA859 diodes which are identical to the MA856 and some genuine 1S1588s as well.

Building up the PCB and even attaching the off board wiring was really quite easy for this kit. The hard part came when I tried to get eight potentiometers, two switches, and two LEDs lined up with <1mm of clearance between the PCB and the stomp switches. 

I painted up the enclosure in a parchment color with calligraphic lettering. I added a charging knight decal from an old 1/35th scale Tiger tank kit to give the enclosure a splash of color. The black decals were all printed out on my laser printer using clear waterslide transfer paper.

As with all of my builds, I make sure "Steggo" gets pride of place on both the front and rear of the enclosure. I may have to modify some of my logo work going forward as I move into UV printing, but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

Initially the pedal seemed to fire up with no problems. Both LEDs lit up properly - so everything looked promising. Unfortunately when I plugged in my guitar, I discovered a problem on the B side. When I changed the switch from one mode to another I could completely lose signal. It seemed like a toggle switch issue, so I suspected a cold solder joint. Once I reflowed the pads for that switch and added some solder, the pedal fired up like a dream - literally. This one will likely find a permanent home on my pedal board!