Early Style Fuzz - Cloning the Jext Telez White Pedal

Fuzz effects are some of the earliest guitar pedals produced, and now they come in a fairly dizzying array trying to capture specific tones. The Jext Telez White Pedal tries to capture the sound from the Beatles White Album among other stacked 60's vintage sounds, and honestly it does a good job of it. Unfortunately like so many boutique pedals, used examples of even the Version 2 pedal will set you back over $600, with Version 1 pedals quickly climbing above $1000. Fortunately PedalPCB provides a platform to build your own clone as the Conqueror Fuzz!

Overall the PCB itself isn't that complex, but it does have a few specialized components. I'm doing a pretty "modern" build on this one without NOS vintage components. The resistors are all 1% metal film Yageo and I think one KAO Speer. The film capacitors are all Wima (5% and one 10% tolerance) and KEMET (all 5% tolerance). The electrolytic capacitors are all Nichicon, apart from the 470uF, which I had to go to a Panasonic to fit the available footprint on the PCB. The design uses both BC548 and 2N4125 transistors. The BC548 transistors are the B variant with a medium to high gain. The design also uses an Inductor - I went ahead and sprung for a Dunlop Fasel re-issue.

Everything fits very neatly into a 125B enclosure. If I'd moved some components around a bit, I may have been able to even add a battery to this one, but I decided against it as I had "an idea" for the art and sort of needed the space. The off-board wiring follows my normal procedure - star ground on the input and ribbon cable connecting the 3PDT daughter board to the main PCB.

For the enclosure, I needed to make a reference both to the pedal (the White Pedal) and a dinosaur. I mulled it over for a while, and then my inner Tolkien geek asserted itself and the answer was obvious - "Sauropod the White!" I already had a couple of good licensed Tolkien fonts, so getting the pedal design together from there was easy. If you're wondering, the Elvish around the stomp switch says,

"One pedal to rule them all, one pedal to find them, One pedal to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them..."

... of course!

Steggo Studio's resident Sauropod, Belvedere the Brachiosaurus, couldn't wait to show off with a couple of these. I'm not sure what he's doing what that ring, though. I may be a bit worried...