Death Pedal - Cloning the Boss HM-2

So, think of this as a "bonus" Boss pedal blog entry. In my review of the AionFX Emerald, I'd indicated that it was my second Boss pedal build after the Dimension Chorus and later edited the post indicating that there was one other Boss pedal I'd completed. I'd forgotten that this particular build, the AionFX Graviton, was a Boss pedal for a couple of reasons. First, it was one of my very early builds and second, I went with a completely non-Boss inspired original enclosure design for the pedal itself. The project itself is a clone of the somewhat niche Boss HM-2 "Heavy Metal" distortion pedal. It was only originally produced from 1983 to 1991 with little fanfare, but apparently the Scandinavian Death Metal scene has decided to pick it up, crank all of the knobs to 11, and run with it. Waza Craft new production versions of this pedal will set you back almost $200, with original Boss models exceeding that. So once again this is a great candidate for cloning.

So, first some disclaimers. As you can see from the board above, this is one of my early builds because I'm still using a mixture of 1% metal film and 5% carbon resistors. All of the capacitors are higher end film and electrolytic, and I did spring for the right ICs as well. At this time this was probably the most involved build I'd ever attempted, and I was still working out how I wanted to do enclosures and everything else. I was also still using all-purple wires for all of my builds. I've since gone to different colors for different parts of the circuit to help keep things straight. Fortunately on this one I managed to get everything right.

AionFX rates this as an "intermediate" build, and honestly I think that's about right. The part count is high, but there's nothing especially tricky about the build, unless you decide you want to add a "Mids" functionality - then you're having to cut traces and add a 9mm pot in the center of the board. There are a few other potential modifications in the build notes including adjusting the EQ filters, but that starts creating a whole new pedal by moving away from the standard HM-2 tone.

For the enclosure, I decided to go with some of the "heaviest" metal of all - Uranium. In this case, the Uranium-235 isotope which is enriched for nuclear power or other applications which require fission. I also threw in a Soviet era radiation symbol and a pseudo-Cyrillic looking font. I added metallizer to many of the fittings to better match the hammered bronze look, and turned all of the knobs all the way up (as is apparently right and proper) for its photo shoot.

All that being said, while this pedal has become a bit of a niche pedal, if you play with the settings it is actually a fairly useful little distortion pedal. If you want your guitar to sound like an absolute buzzsaw - crank it up. If you want some screaming feedback too, throw a boost pedal behind it. Otherwise, there are a lot of decent tones you can get from it if you exercise the full range of settings, as you can see in the video demo by RJ Ronquillo using the stock AionFX kit. I may actually revisit this board and build one in the same style as my other Boss pedals and put this fun beauty up for grabs.