Fuzz pedals are one of the oldest types of effects pedals out there, but there is always something new coming out with tweaks and variations on various circuits and concepts. The ZVEX Wooly Mammoth is a newer niche pedal with a fairly distinguished following. It is also unfortunately fairly expensive, making it a great candidate for cloning. Once again, South Obolon FX had laid out a really decent board for this build, so I took the plunge!
For such an expensive pedal, the basic PCB for the Wooly Mammoth (or in this case, the Polar Elephant board) is amazingly simple. As per my normal practice on modern builds, I'm using all Yageo 1% metal film resistors. The film capacitors are WIMA and KEMET. The electrolytic capacitors are Nichicon. I am using a more vintage 1N5817 diode as the circuit protection diode. There are also two new 2N3904 transistors rounding out the parts count.
Wiring is also very straightforward. I'm using a star ground to the input jack and a 3PDT daughter board for the stomp switch. While the Polar Elephant PCB includes an LED brightness resistor, the LED itself has to be completely wired off board. This isn't really a detraction as it lets you put the LED wherever you need to based on how you want to lay out the enclosure. Once again I'm using heat shrink tubing on all of the jack connections. While there was space in the enclosure, I didn't include a connection for a battery.
This is a case where the original pedal name could have easily fit into the Steggo pantheon of effects pedals as is, but obviously I couldn't go with that as it is already taken. So I decided on another prehistoric proboscidean - the mastodon - in this case the Fluffy Mastodon. I ended up going with a few mini-brutalist knobs from Love My Switches to round out the overall effect. The sound of the pedal matches what I've seen online, and honestly I really like it. The pedal affords you more degrees of freedom in setting your final tone, which is a good thing in my book!
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