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.

As you can see from the photo above, I've uncharacteristically boxed the board before taking a photo of the PCB. That was on purpose this time as I'd added snap sockets for the transistor leads, and during assembly and final test of the unit, the leads on the vintage transistors were at their normal length, meaning they sat around 1.5" above the PCB - which looked not only a bit dorky, but was hard to photograph without pulling out the DSLR camera. As mentioned previously, I've had some recent transistor issues, but of course just as soon as I start socketing them, they all work perfectly, including these.

If you look carefully there are also some locations to test the voltage across the transistors. The instruction set gives you values they need to be set for to get the proper tone. The actual voltage is adjusted using the two trimmer resistors in the lower right-hand corner of the PCB.

For the enclosure, this was just another fun one. I'm a fan of hedgehogs, so given they're sort of fuzzy, in a spikey way, I decided to go with Hedgehog on this particular one. I've played around with it a bit - it has the strong fuzz tone I tend to get with germanium-based pedals, though the volume drop is noticeable across the pedal - even with the volume knob turned up. Regardless, it was a fun build, and is great for that 60s-vintage fuzz sound!