Dinosaural Tube Bender Clone - the Wyvern!

So this build is a clone of another rare beast, the Dinosaural Tube Bender. I've honestly never seen one for sale, but it does have an interesting history. Designed by Dan Coggins and originally published as a DIY project in the UK version of Guitar Magazine, Dan made additional tweaks to the design and released it under his Dinosaural brand, with only about 140 being produced in the original run from 2003-2007 (with an additional 12 being built from original components in 2016). Aion FX traced one of the production models and has released it as the Wyvern. 

Well Rats - A Pro Co Rat Clone!

Introduced in 1978, the Pro Co Rat distortion pedal became a staple of 1980s hard rock and heavy metal music. While still in production, the Rat has gone through several iterations, though the basic circuit really hasn't changed much. One of the first pedals I picked up was a new production Pro Co Rat pedal, but Aion FX has a version under the name "Helios" which not only adds some additional functionality, but uses a standard 125B enclosure making laying out the increasingly precious geography on my pedal board a bit easier!

How Much Fuzz is Too Much Fuzz??? The World May Never Know...

Apologies for my enforced absence for the past few days. I'd just built a new computer and had encountered all sorts of issues with it from BIOS to drivers. Fortunately there weren't any hardware issues, but the BIOS issues involved getting a local shop to help sort them out. In the interim I've been busily working away on a few new pedals with a few new techniques I'd picked up on the DIY Stompboxes Unoffical page on Facebook. The first I'll feature here is the Aion Phobos, which is a version of the Tone Bender Mark III from 1967-8. It's a very early fuzz pedal with three germanium transistors and a built-in voltage inverter that maintains the positive (effective) ground of the original while using a standard center negative power supply.

Live Long, and Fuzz - The Vulcan Octave Fuzz

Aion's Vulcan is a recreation of the fOXX Tone Machine initially released in 1971. This is a fairly thick fuzz pedal that appears to have gone through a couple of iterations before it was discontinued in 1978. Aion FX provides documentation and specs for two versions both using 2N3565 transistors. The early version uses transistors with hFE in the 230-250 range while the late version uses transistors with an hFE of over 450. I'd initially intended to build the late version, but when all of my 2N3565s sorted low, I ended up going with an early build.

Pi All Around - Two Unique Versions of an Ubiquitous Pedal!

The Big Muff Pi, originally designed by Mike Matthews and released by his company Electro-Harmonix in 1969, is one of the most ubiquitous pedals ever produced. Combining elements of both distortion and fuzz with variable sustain, the Big Muff has been produced in a dizzying array of varieties over the years. Many of the variants were a result of EHX simply changing the value of the components willy-nilly during the production run. When Electro-Harmonix went out of business in 1982, clones and copies exploded on the scene, and Mike Matthews would re-open shop in the USSR under the Sovtek brand name and begin re-issuing his designs in the early 1990s. Matthews would bring production back to the US in 2000, and numerous new editions of the pedal have been released since then. If you're interested in the history of this great pedal, there are several great references, but one of the best is Kit Rae's page. 

Aion FX offers the Halo, which is their trace of the Big Muff. The only change is a mid-range switch that provides three mid-tone options: stock, flat, and boosted. Otherwise the circuit is a completely faithful tracing of the original. A spreadsheet of 18 different versions is included so you can target any variant with your build - or play around and develop your own recipe. At this point I've built two versions which are included in this entry, a Ram's Head '73 Gilmour and a Civil War / Red Army version. Depending on what transistors I'm able to find, I may go back and build other variants as well, as these are a lot of fun!

A Pair of Wooly Fuzz Pedals

Fuzz pedals are one of the more popular builds in the DIY community because of the variety of options, both vintage and modern, out there. Fuzz and Distortion sounds formed the foundation of rock and blues music in the 50s, 60s, and 70s with the Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz Tone commonly thought to be the first available effects pedal being released in 1962. For these two builds, I used the Aion FX Calliope board which replicates the Catalinbread Karma Suture - which in of itself is an adaptation of the earlier Interfax Harmonic Percolator. The Karma Suture is a fairly modern pedal first released as a germanium transistor based version in 2014. A silicon version followed in 2016. They're not terribly expensive or rare, but they are a great simple build which will let you get a pedal for a fraction of the cost of an original.

One Klone to Rule them All

The Klon Centaur - one of the most sought after overdrive pedals. Originally built by Bill Finnegan from 1994-2008, he was never able to keep up with demand and prices quickly rose. With only about 8000 produced it is an exceedingly rare beast, and prices for originals currently range from about $5000 to $7500. Because of its price and popularity, a number of clones of the original have sprung up - arguably more than just about any other pedal out there. Available pedals cover the full range range from faithful copies to cheap Chinese rip-offs with modifications, improvements, and variations of every stripe in between. 

In the interest of full disclosure, the first guitar pedal I tried to build was the Ceriatone Centura - a near exact copy of the original Klon Centaur, right down to the enclosure and knobs. That build wasn't entirely successful, and to be honest, I'm still debugging it. Fast forward a few months and The Tone Geek has released his BFK, a signal copy of the original Klon Centaur using a more modern 2-layer PCB with thicker traces and better grounding. It would also fit in the original style enclosure, and as I happened to have a spare Centura enclosure with a damaged paint job, I repainted it for this new build.

Dinosaural Compressor OTC-201 Clone - With a Real Dino!

So this was another really fun build that may now be usurping some of my other compressor pedals as my favorite - at least for my single-coil guitars. That being said, my stock MXR Dyna Comp is still fairly amazing when I pull out my Les Paul. This build recreates a rare, though not ridiculously expensive ($300-$400-ish), compressor pedal - the Dinosaural OTC-201. Aion FX sells this as the Convex in both PCB and kit forms. I went ahead and picked mine up as a PCB as I wanted to hand pick some of the components and get as close to the original as possible.

Fresh Compressed Orange Juice?

This build is a clone of the Orange Squeezer compression circuit by Guitar PCB called the "Julius". I picked up the PCB for this project because it's pretty much the sound Mark Knopfler uses on "Sultans of Swing" - which I need a lot more practice before I'm competent at! This build itself is pretty straightforward with very few parts. Guitar PCB is a smaller outfit, so you get a parts list and some decent instructions, but unlike Aion FX there isn't a pre-populated shopping list with part numbers for Mouser or Tayda. I just added additional parts to an order I was making to cover the components needed for this build.

What's the Vector, Victor?

So here is my first "twin" build (well - sort of - we'll get to that later). I've been building several pedals lately (obviously) and I have a colleague who is also a guitarist looking for a delay pedal. Since I had the Aion Vector on my "to do" list, I didn't figure it would be too much more trouble to just build two at the same time, and for the most part that held true. It was sort of nice to be able to double check the placement of all of the components as I went through and make sure I didn't accidentally goof something up. The Vector is based on the Mad Professor Deep Blue Delay and the PT2399 delay chip. It is a digital delay, but one that many analog purists will at least tolerate. Unlike many of the pedals I've worked on, this one isn't ridiculously expensive, but it is still cheaper to build (~$40-50) than buy ($170-$200 used on reverb).