Cloning the Rare EQD Black Ash

The EQD Black Ash was a limited production fuzz pedal using a variety of vintage parts including carbon composition resistors and paper-in-oil capacitors. The total production was limited to 1500 units, and prices are rapidly rising at this point, with examples starting at roughly $300 and going up from there. When it came to cloning this particular pedal, I'd considered going with a vintage build like I've done with a variety of other pedals, but I've found they often have a higher noise floor than pedals with modern components so for this build I decided to go with modern components to validate the design and sound. I may go back and do a vintage build at some point in the future, though!

I absent mindedly forgot to take a close-up of the board itself before I put it into the enclosure, so the picture above will have to do for now. I'm using the South Obolon FX Black Bender board, in black of course! My PCB choice also sort of dictated the use of more modern components, as there really isn't room for the 1/2W resistors or large capacitors to be easily incorporated. For this build all of the resistors are 1% metal film, 1/4 Watt Yageo. The film capacitors are WIMA and KEMET and the electrolytic capacitors are all Nichcon. The transistors are all 2N3903. To get the most out of the pedal, Q3 has to be biased, and there is a convenient pad where you can set the bias on the transistor.

The offboard wiring follows my usual technique with a star ground on the input. The LED is also wired offboard, so I found a convenient place to put it near the top of the enclosure. I'm using a 3PDT daughter board for the stomp switch. All of the jack connections (and the LED connections) are covered in heat shrink tubing. While there was room for a battery, I decided to not include one at this point.

The original Black Ash design was quite striking, so I had to come up with something at least equally dramatic for the "Steggo" version of the pedal - and I think I managed to do it. According to Wikipedia:

The Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event[a] (also known as the Cretaceous–Tertiary (K–T) extinction) is a sudden mass extinction of three-quarters of the plant and animal species on Earth, approximately 66 million years ago.

Caused by a massive asteroid impact, the earth rapidly heated and what species survived then had to endure the impact winter caused by the choking of the atmosphere with ash and other debris. Once again using licensed clipart of dinosaurs fleeing, I edited it heavily in Photoshop before moving it over to Illustrator to create a vectorized version of it. 

The sound of the pedal is really good, and really unique. I'm working through various settings to ensure it matches demos I've seen online, and so far so good. At this point it is right up there among my favorite fuzz pedals (others near the top of that list would be my Fluffy Mastodon and the Monolith), so it will likely show up on the pedal board with some frequency!