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.

As you can see from the circuit board above, it is nearly identical to the original Klon and Ceriatone board. There is an importable Mouser part list on the Tone Geek site, and I just used his part load out rather than going through and sourcing my own. His build uses slightly looser tolerance resistors than I use on most of my builds, but based on the sound I'm getting from the pedal, it's not hurting its performance at this point. The Tone Geek build also makes more use of film capacitors rather than ceramic capacitors in the original as well. The one part I did provide myself are the germanium diodes (i.e. the "magic" diodes). I have a small supply of Russian D9E parts, and I dropped two into the board.

As I already had an enclosure, I decided to have a little fun with the pedal name. I'm a long time Star Wars fan (yes - I saw the original in the theater in 1977), and the recent Clone Wars cartoons were pretty decent - so - enter "The Klone Wars." I repainted the enclosure using Alclad II metalizer, found a decent Star Wars font online, and created some custom decals on my laser printer. The decals continue on the back, and there is also a "Steggo" on the front (not pictured).

This pedal follows exactly the same wiring diagram used for the Ceriatone Centura. As that was the one pedal I've built that isn't working, I was simultaneously nervous and had a profound sense of deja vu when wiring this pedal up. Of course, it uses the larger 9V plug and 111X and 112BX jacks I'm used to on other builds. Once I got it wired up I plugged in the 9V DC and it fired right up. I've only started doing a few sound checks so far, but the clean clear overdrive is just amazing!

So there you have it - I finally have a working Klon clone, and I feel a certain sense of vindication that I was able to get this pedal working first time. Now I need to go back and figure out what's wrong with the Ceriatone. I've done a few part swaps and wiring swaps, but it still isn't coming to life. When I get it working I'm going to have to compare tones to this one.