A New Steggo Pedal - The Pterodactyl Phaser!!!

Back in February, I finished my first build of the AionFX Emerald - a clone of the Boss PH-1R phaser. It was a really nice pedal, in fact it is finding a semi-permanent home on my pedal board. It wasn't an easy build, as there are a lot of components and the pedal has to be properly biased once assembled. Now that I'm assembling a whole range of dinosaur-themed pedals, I wanted to include a phaser, and I had a great idea for the enclosure (more on that in a bit). It was really just a question of which phaser to choose. Most of the fun of DIY is building something that is hard to come by because of cost, rarity, the fact that it is out of production, or a combination of all of those. Since the Boss pedal is long out of production, and retail it generally costs $200-$300 US, I figured it fit the bill.

As with the previous build, used nearly all modern components to populate the PCB - the only exception is I ended up using a fair number of Panasonic metal film capacitors. They're extremely high quality and seem to work for a Japanese pedal. Another difference this time around was the fact that I decided to use right angle pin headers rather than making jumpers for the matched set of JFETs. It gives the pedal a neat look and it allowed me to line everything up perfectly. I was running short MLCC capacitors, so I ended up substituting a silver mica capacitor in one of the builds (the large yellow capacitor bottom center).

The wiring follows my normal practice for AionFX pedals using a star ground on the input jack. Generally this has worked well for me.

For the pedal name, I wanted to make a reference to the book P is for Pterodactyl: The Worst Alphabet Book Ever by Raj Haldar (Author), Chris Carpenter (Author), and Maria Beddia (Illustrator). The book is a tongue in cheek take on classic children's alphabet books where the letters all have atypical pronunciation - like the psychic pterodactyl. I figured having a Pterodactyl Phaser fit the theme perfectly.

The first time I built this pedal, I tried to match the look of the original Boss enclosure as closely as possible right down to the font. It was effective, clean, and like most Boss pedals, a little bit boring. This time around I decided to go in a completely different direction and create something unique. The enclosure once again features my wife's art in the style of medieval manuscript marginalia (say that three times fast!). Honestly, I really like the look much better than my first one - not that there's anything wrong with the first one, this is just a lot more fun, and a lot more... well... dino-like! Unfortunately I'm now out of these knobs, and need to figure out where I got them so I can get more.

The sound of the phaser is excellent. There is an internal trimmer that lets you adjust the bias by ear (though it can also be done with an oscilloscope). The sound is so good that it has finally pushed my MXR Phase 90 off of the board permanently. In fact, I think all of my MXR pedals will likely be finding new homes soon as they just can't stand up to the horsepower of the pedals I've been building!

Finally here is a photo of Steggi, our resident electrical expert who biased the pedals herself, in the official introduction photo. The color of the pedal sort of matches her... scales???