Special Dinovember 2023 Edition Dimetrodon Distortion Build Report!

A while back I had a Dimetrodon Distortion enclosure that had a bit of a problem. It had gotten scratched up, although the UV printing on the face of the enclosure was just great. I'd had mixed results trying to paint enclosures in the past, but I found some powder coat spray paint (rather than having to go through the powder coating process) and I figured this would be a great opportunity to see if I could recover a damaged enclosure - and then I decided to take it a few steps further!

Spoiler alert - I was able to get the sides of the enclosure repainted to fix the issues with the powder coat. It's sort of a textured semi-gloss now, and looks really cool, but I decided rather than stopping there and selling something as a "B-Stock" enclosure, it would be much cooler to do something fun with it.

As you can see from the front of the enclosure, the UV printing looks perfect. There was no damage to it. It also gives you the first hint that this isn't a regular Dimetrodon Distortion pedal. The LED is a diffused red and the knobs are red as well (as opposed to clear golden-yellow and black respectively). 

The inside hides a few more changes. For this particular build I conducted a poll on my Instagram feed asking the readers to choose between a Triangle, '73 Ram's Head, and Sovtek/Green Russian tone stack. I picked these three as these are tone stacks that my new Dimetrodon Deluxe can't do. The vote overwhelmingly went for the Sovtek stack, so I went with it. If you remember in the Dimetrodon Deluxe article, the Sovtek stack isn't as deeply scooped and is a bit bassier than the '75 Ram's Head, and in testing it did give the pedal a bit darker character in spots on the tone control. I also found a way to use ribbon cable to attach the main and daughter boards together on this build. Granted, I have to cut the plastic webbing on the ribbon cable quite a bit to make it work, but it's still faster than cutting individual lengths of hook-up wire. 

Adding to the fun, earlier this month I found out about something called Dinovember. It was started by authors Refe and Susan Tuma as a fun way to encourage their children's imagination. Basically every evening they would pose their children's' plastic dinosaurs doing fun activities as if they came to life over night... hummm... Given there is a fair amount of convergent evolutionary theme between Steggo Studios and Dinovember, I figured it would be fun to make a couple of Dinovember 2023 edition pedals (and I'll likely do something like this every year going forward). So as you can see from the etched back plate, this is one of the two 2023 pedals (the other one will likely be a Saurus Regina variant). 

Since I had the laser etcher out anyway, I wanted to test out the concept of etching the sides of an enclosure as opposed to just the back plate. I had to raise up the etcher, but as you can see from the photo above I was able to get it to work very well. It gives the pedal a sort of an Abbey Road vibe.

So what started out as a project to fix a damaged enclosure, turned into something a lot more fun. I really love how the whole pedal came together, and I'm really liking the slightly different tone stack for paired with the pedal as well. I may have to make up one for myself. Of course, next I may have to try and figure out how to create a Dimetrodon with all six of the tone stacks I know of (or at least 4-5), but that's for far out in the future. I have some "other ideas" for pedals I need to breadboard and get made up - including one where I'm teaming up with another builder on something fun!