More Deja Vu - A Truly Steggo Acapulco Gold Clone!

So this is the second official build report for the new "one knob" collection from Steggo, and this one goes back to where the blog started with a build of an EQD Acapulco Gold clone. In a lot of ways it's hard to believe how far the blog and Steggo Studios as a whole has come in a little over a year, and I'm looking forward to what the next year brings!

Unlike my previous Acapulco Gold build where I'd purchased a kit with an unfinished enclosure from Das Musikding, this time I'm using a board laid out by South Obolon FX - the BFG. The South Obolon circuit has a couple of subtle modifications from the version I previously built. First it includes the LED brightness resistor right on the board itself. Second it includes a volume drop resistor. The standard Acapulco Gold pedal is very loud, and the standard setting is to put a 22K resistor in that slot (which is still plenty loud!). If you want to go with the original typhoon level volume, you simply put a jumper into that position. I also managed to lay my hands on the correct LM386N-4 op amps for this build. Otherwise the rest is just one film and a few electrolytic capacitors.

This is only the second pedal I've built in a 1590B enclosure, and the wiring gets a little tight in the bottom half of the enclosure. Of course, part of the reason for the lack of space is I wanted maximum room for enclosure art. Like my Astrodon Physicist build, I didn't include room for a battery. I find that wiring up the DC jack before installing the stomp switch works best as the spacing is very tight, and I want to continue to use heat shrink tubing over the connections. I may start adding some "cable management" ties just to keep everything a bit neater on future builds. For these first few builds I've been using Lumberg jacks, but I may move to standard open frame jacks going forward. 

So what's a Steggo build without an appropriate dinosaur enclosure? According to Wikipedia, the "Acanthopholis (meaning "spiny scales") is a genus of ankylosaurian dinosaur in the family Nodosauridae that lived during the Late Cretaceous Period of England." The beginning of the dinosaur's name was also close enouch to Acapulco for people to get the joke, and I happened to have some really cool licensed art of one. I combined some of the design tricks I'd used on previous Boss and EQD clones with a killer knob for the final enclosure.

I've built a couple of these, one prototype and this full version. The prototype jumpered the volume reducing resistor, while this one included it. The addition of the volume resistor doesn't seem to hamper the pedal much, though I haven't tried to run a max volume test on both in series yet. The sound is pure Acapulco Gold, and this new version will generally replace my previous build on the pedal board going forward.