A Cornish Fuzz Clone - With a Fun Dinosaur!

I was talking to a couple of the great employees at my favorite local guitar shop, Five Star Guitars, and they mentioned a pedal they wanted to try out, but as it was a Cornish pedal, the NG-2, it was rare and expensive. Ever the enterprising DIY builder, I managed to track down a clone of it to see if I could replicate it on a mere mortal's budget. Clones of this particular pedal aren't extremely common, but PedalPCB offers the Nugget Fuzz which is a clone of the original Cornish pedal. Unlike AionFX Cornish clones which come with the Cornish buffer by default, the PedalPCB board in stock configuration is true bypass. They do, however, offer the C-buffer which can be purchased separately to add the active buffer to the pedal. As is more common these days, I figured I'd build a couple of them - one to keep and one to share. I also decided to try one with true bypass and one with the C-bypass to see how much of a difference it makes which is an approach I've used on my P-2 clones which I have versions both with and without the Cornish bypass.

The builds themselves are relatively straightforward with a reasonably low component count - at least for a Cornish pedal! What is not unusual for a Cornish pedal is the cornucopia of different resistance values to contend with, but only two diodes. I ended up using some of my nicer 1N34A diodes with a low-ish leakage current from the batch I tested when I was working through the bugs in my G-2 builds. It also uses BC549 transistors like the original as I'd picked up a hefty stock of them from Pedalhacker. There is one trimmer resistor which lets you set the internal bias (between Q4 and Q5).

While the PedalPCB boards are set up to run the grounds from the input and output jacks directly to the board, I've had good success running a star ground to the input jack - so I decided to go this route for these builds. The photo above is the guts of SN001 which is the true bypass version of the circuit.

As I wanted to go with something close to "copyright free" from the outset, I decided to go ahead and create a dinosaur themed name for these pedals. The name of the original pedal, NG-2, didn't give me a lot to work with. The PedalPCB name, "Nugget Fuzz" when combined with dinosaurs really led me quickly back to "Dino Nuggets" - which my son used to consume mass quantities of when he was younger. So, I went in search of a dinosaur with a name that prominently featured an "N" and a "G" - and oddly enough, I actually found one!

The Ngexisaurus is a fairly rare beast with only one specimen having been found to date, but it was a carnivore that lived in the Middle Jurassic. There were a couple of drawings around that I slightly modified. If I end up making more than a few of these, I'll team up with my wife to create a new drawing of the dinosaur itself. The rest of the enclosure is an homage to the original Cornish enclosure, but the name is far enough off to be something different.

For the second pedal I went ahead and assembled the C-buffer, which reminds me a lot of the Effects Layout buffer I use on my Cornish P-2 clones (which is yet another pedal that needs a Steggo approved dinosaur themed name). The main difference is the C-buffer uses a standard 3PDT stomp switch while the Effect Layout Cornish Buffer uses a 2PDT switch.

The wiring with the Cornish Buffer is a bit more complicated with separate ground and +9V lines running from both the board and the buffer itself. As with the EL buffer, all of the components face the top of the enclosure (as there wouldn't be enough room for electrolytic capacitors to face the bottom). I was probably a little more generous than I needed to be with my wiring allowances for this build, but I wanted to make sure I didn't stress any of the connections.

The enclosures are exactly the same at this point, and I'll probably only make one version of this going forward. At this point I've biased both pedals by ear, but I can't tell a huge difference between the two. I think I like the one with the buffer a tiny bit better, and as this is a Cornish clone, I think I'll likely focus on those with buffers going forward. I may even move my P-2 clones to this buffer rather than the hand etched one.