Another Amazing Overdrive - Steggo's Layout of the Boneyard Emerald Green Overdrive

Chuck's Boneyard on the PedalPCB forum is an absolute wealth of information on pedal building as well as mods of famous (or not so famous) circuits. I've laid out boards for a few of the designs on the Boneyard and worked out a licensing arrangement to sell a few based on the schematics on the forum. All of the once I've breadboarded and laid out have been great pedals. A couple, however, reach the level of amazing pedals. The Celestial Engineering Timbre Man, which in Steggo livery is the Falcarius Overdrive, was the first to hit the "amazing" tier. The subject of this build report - Chuck's take on the Emerald Green Overdrive - is the second to hit that tier.

As you can see from the PCB above, the Emerald Green Overdrive has a few more parts than my most recent previous Boneyard adaptation, the Silvasaurus. Most of the parts are fairly standard. I'm using my normal mix of 1% tolerance metal film resistors and mostly 5% tolerance film capacitors. There are a couple of 470nF film capacitors that I think may be 10%. Most of the heavy lifting on the circuit is done by three transistors and two hard clipping diodes. The original transistors from the Emerald Green Overdrive are out of production, but I was able to find a few to use in my build.

The rest of the construction of the pedal followed my normal method. I'm using my 3PDT daughter board with the LED and current limiting resistor onboard. The daughter board is run to the main PCB with ribbon cable. All of the wires running power, audio, and ground are aviation grade wiring - all of which is insulated with heat shrink tubing where they connect with the jacks.

As per my normal procedure I went ahead and added a few Easter eggs to the board including the "Because who doesn't love dinosaurs?" tag line and a gryposaurus icon. What I forgot to add was the "original design by Celestial Engineering" credit which I add to all Boneyard designs. I would blame Steggi as she did the layout, but then she'd look at me... like this:

... so I just owned up to it and moved along.

I did, however, come up with what I think is a solution until I can get more boards made. Honestly I like it so much I may start doing it on other Boneyard designs. I laser etched Celestial Engineering credit to the back of the enclosure. Given none of the Boneyard designs I've made have batteries, this way people will actually get to see the logo. 

For the enclosure, I once again enlisted my friend Kate in Ukraine to create an amazing green Gryposaurus. According to Wikipedia:

"Gryposaurus (meaning "hooked-nosed (Greek grypos) lizard"; sometimes incorrectly translated as "griffin (Latin gryphus) lizard") was a genus of duckbilled dinosaur that lived about 80 to 75 million years ago, in the Late Cretaceous (late Santonian to late Campanian stages) of North America. Named species of Gryposaurus are known from the Dinosaur Park Formation in Alberta, Canada, and two formations in the United States: the Lower Two Medicine Formation in Montana and the Kaiparowits Formation of Utah. A possible additional species from the Javelina Formation in Texas may extend the temporal range of the genus to 66 million years ago."

It took some time to find a background that worked with the dinosaur - and I spent a fair amount of time consulting with Kate before we got to the final product. That being said, I wanted to do something different as I'd done a lot of "Greek" themed enclosures, and I think this version really came out pretty cool!

As to the sound. As I said before, this is one of the pedals that hits that "amazing" tier. It sounds so good I'm likely going to finally break down and try and record my own demo of it - and suffer the ridicule of the guitar playing public as I fumble my way through. Once I get the demo together, I'll post a link.