A Third Thagomizer!?!!??? Another Vintage Power Boost Build

I have a real weakness for vintage pedals. Over and above that, vintage pedals built from vintage components probably reach the level of my kryptonite (along with chocolate, or a good steak... good seafood... I'm doomed...)! I've made a few forays into that territory with my Big Muff Pi builds (most notably my recent Violet Ram's Head build) and my builds of the Colorsound Power Boost (also known as "The Thagomizer I"). The army green enclosure version uses Iskra resistors (as well as tropical fish capacitors and vintage axial capacitors) while the orange enclosure version uses Phier resistors (and the same mix of other components). I'd sourced these parts as sets from a wonderful chap in Italy, but the problem with vintage parts is there is a finite number of remaining NOS in the world. So if the supply of Iskra and Phier sets dried up, I wanted to have another option for building vintage Thagomizers - so I decided to go shopping and assemble my own set of parts.

As with my previous builds, I'm starting with the AionFX Nucleus project as it is a solid board that includes the 18V charge pump onboard. For the resistors, I decided to go with something I figured I could get a reasonable supply of - Allen Bradley military spec carbon resistors. I've used these in a lot of vintage builds, and I've always been impressed by them. As it turns out a have a friend whose parent worked for Allen Bradley once upon a time. I think it would have been amazingly cool to see the production back in the day.

For the tropical fish capacitors, I found some sources of Mullard capacitors online. These are large capacitors, and as they're typically fairly fragile, I had to be super careful bending the leads to ensure they fit into the PCB. One of these days I'm going to have to go 100% old school and just frikkin' build something on an original sized board in an original-sized enclosure! The rest of the components are pretty much the same as I've used on the previous builds, though I did source my own ceramic capacitor.

I've gone ahead and started adding battery snaps to these pedals, as the originals would have had them (most early pedals only ran off of batteries - and the original Power Boost actually ran off of two 9V batteries in series as it was an 18V circuit). I'm presuming anyone who decides to use batteries in these will be careful with both large and somewhat fragile components in the box.

The enclosure, of course, carries forward the theme of the other Thagomizer I pedals, but this time it is in silver with orange / black outline text. I think I'll make the text a bit bolder next time, as it is a little harder to see the orange in the smaller text than I'd like. I've tested this one and it sounds excellent - in fact I almost always use a Thagomizer with my single coil guitars for certain songs. At this point, I can't tell a lot of difference between any of the vintage versions of the Thagomizer from a casual listen, but I haven't done a full side by side comparison. I expect I'd hear a difference if I built one with all modern components - which I guess should be next on the list.

I have enough components to build several of these, as well as a couple of boards and a spare enclosure. These run $130 just like the orange box version - so shoot me a mail / message if you'd like one!