Distortion and fuzz pedals are an absolute effects pedal staple. I've built a wide variety, but I wanted to build something a bit on the harder side to compliment my hand-etched International Style clone of the Brutalist Jr. Looking through some of my available options, I thought that the Mountainking Megalith would be an interesting choice because of its wide functionality and utility for metal guitar and bass. PedalPCB offers a ready-made board as the Arkaim Fuzz, so I decided to take the plunge!
As you can see from the photo above, the board is not incredibly dense. Most of the heavy lifting for the clipping circuit is done with the transistors and I'm presuming the 3mm orange LED (which is an unusual choice, but seems to work pretty well!). It would be interesting to see if the PCB could be shrunk to the point to where it would fit in a 125B enclosure like the AionFX clone of the vintage Roland BeeBaa I built back in February. It would probably be tight, but doable given the relatively low component count.
The Mountainking site indicates he is using NOS (new old stock) components for the builds, but I'm using all new transistors of the specified model. I'm also using modern metal film resistors, capacitors, etc. as is my normal practice for non-vintage builds. I'm also using my standard star ground for this particular build. The pedal includes two foot switches - one for bypass and one for "heavy" mode, which really makes the pedal crank!
The enclosure for this project came about in a sort of roundabout way. As you know, the humans behind the dinos here at Steggo Studios are all, well, big dinosaur fans. One of our favorites is the Miragaia, which has recently gotten a lot of exposure because of the release of a Jurassic Park Dominion toy. We'd picked one up, at which point our son said it looked like "a goth Steggo" - so I had to dedicate one of the "doomiest" pedals around to this dino! The first batch of enclosures were a tad off center, but look fine once the knobs are on.
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