Under the Sea! Cloning the Quirky EQD Sea Machine

I've been on a bit of a modulation pedal kick lately because I'd gotten some requests from friends, including this build, a clone of the Earthquaker Devices Sea Machine. Touted as a "super chorus" pedal, as with most EQD modulation pedals, this one isn't a one-trick pony and has several very unusual controls that provide a very wide tonal palette. While it is still in production, the "real thing" runs around $199 brand new, so it isn't exactly a cheap pedal - making it a decent candidate for cloning.

For this build I started with the excellent PedalPCB Sea Horse board. As with all PedalPCB boards, its tight, yet incredibly well laid out. In order to fit the pedal neatly into a 125B enclosure the layout calls for 1/8W resistors rather than the more typical 1/4W resistors. I ended up using Yageo 1/6W resistors rather than the 1/8W resistors as they are the same size (3.4mm) and the leads were a little more substantial. Almost all of the film caps are WIMA, though there is one Panasonic as well. The electrolytic capacitors are all WIMA. The layout includes three fairly substantial integrated circuits -including a PT2399 delay chip which is the primary modulation chip. All of these have been socketed.

In order to accommodate the enclosure art, I decided to move the LED from its normal position on the main PCB right above the daughter board connectors to a position to the left of the stomp switch (viewed from the top). All of the potentiometers, especially the three that can easily come in contact with the PCB itself, have dust covers. The main PCB is attached to the daughter board with a ribbon cable, and all of the jack connections are insulated with heat-shrink tubing.

In keeping with the "Under the Sea" theme, the pedal features an aquatic dinosaur - the Kronosaurus. According to Wikipedia:

"Kronosaurus is an extinct and potentially dubious genus of short-necked pliosaurs that lived during the Early Cretaceous period (Aptian to Late Albian) in what is now Australia. One species is known, K. queenslandicus, described in 1924 from a partial fossil discovered in Queensland (hence its name). The rare other fossils traditionally attributed to the genus indicate that the animal should have reached a size approaching 10 meters (33 ft) in length." 

I found some decent licensable art online and combined the dinosaur (getting ready to snack on a couple of nautilus) with a suitable undersea backdrop and graphics.

In terms of the sound, it matches the demos I've seen online of the pedal. It's a fairly complex pedal because of all of the different controls, but it certainly gives you a lot more options than you get from a typical chorus pedal