Fortunately Effects Layouts has traced the circuit and has an etchable PCB. I did have a little trouble on the etches - likely because I was using two light sources and had some parallax error - nothing a little work with the engraver couldn't fix! The layout is both typical and atypical as big muff circuits go - there are the four transistor gain stages, but two of them are NTE103A germanium transistors. One is a conventional MPSA18, but the oddball is Q4 which is listed as FS25444. As far as I've been able to determine, there is no such animal - anywhere. The only mention of an FS25444 transistor is in relation to "The Sweet" as far as I've been able to find online, so I'm guessing that this is a rebrand of some sort. The Effects Layout instructions indicate the usual suspects will work (2N5088, MPSA18, BC549C, etc), so I ended up going that route. I really wish I knew what that transistor actually was so I could breadboard it, or at least find out what the gain of the transistor actually was.
The rest of the assembly was really fairly straightforward. The layout was very clean with all of the components in parallel rows. That made it very easy to keep track of everything as I was populating the drilled, etched PCB. The layout uses a lot (I mean a lot!) of 1uF electrolytic capacitors. Again, at some point I may breadboard this and see what difference (if any) film capacitors would make in the tone.
The rest of the wiring is typical for my EL builds. I use a star ground like I'd use on an AionFX board, and all of the jack connections are wrapped in heat-shrink tubing. I'm using a PedalPCB 3PDT daughter board (I'm going through these like water because they're probably the best I've used) to hook up the stomp switch, and the LED is completely wired off board.
The enclosure still needs the metal "Steggo" logo attached to the front, but I went ahead and got a photo of it. This one is a fairly simple enclosure featuring a happy Suchomimus. The name is a bit of a stretch - "The Sweet" reminds me of sugar, table sugar is sucrose, and "Suchomimus" was the closest dinosaur name I could find to sucrose, but he looks cool. The rest of the enclosure is just white on black as the original pedal is a mix of white and green text on black.
The tone of this pedal is, well, very different from what I'd initially expected reading the descriptions. Frantone describes The Sweet as:
"Over the top in every way using the classic tone of germanium transistors. This is the longest sustaining and smoothest sounding all-transistor fuzztone you will ever own. I have designed many fuzztones, including the 2000 New York City Big Muff for Electro-Harmonix, so believe me when I say that this is the most extreme one I have ever made. It's tone is indescribable. The full bottom and crisp highs will astound you, and the endless sustain will make you cry like a baby. But don't take my word for it.. try one for yourself!"
Before I got the pedal together, I'd hit some demos online, and from what I've seen, it's really more of a "doom fuzz" than a pedal with "crisp highs." Once I got my version together, it sounded very much like what I'd seen online - a doom fuzz with a fairly high noise floor. However, the volume will go so far above unity, the noise floor issues can be mitigated fairly well with the volume knob. As a "doom fuzz" it sounds great, but it will probably limit the overall utility of the pedal for me. I do want to experiment with it some more, and maybe find the real thing somewhere to compare it to.
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