Red Llama with mods is being soldered

In my last post I kinda talked about how I was making a pedal for my friend. The pedal I'm making is the Way Huge Red Llama, a personal favourite of mine. But to change things up I made a mod, i'll get into that later. Over the 5 pedals I've made, I've developed some pretty sweet techniques to make life a whole lot easier! And I'll show you some of them in this post

The mod that I made to the circuit was a gain mod. If the 100k resistor that connects to the drive pot increases in value, like to 10M, then the pedal will have a higher gain. Since being able to switch between a stock red llama, which sounds fantastic, and a higher gain llama is very useful, I used a DPDT switch to switch between two resistors. 

Where the 100k resistor would be originally, I have two wires running from those holes to the switch

I used the twisty wire technique cause it looks sweet and takes up less space

I tried to bend the wires in a way that will stop the solder side of the board from touching the switch

For this build I used this trick that I put all the pots and switched on cardboard. This really helped me out so I can solder with more accuracy and I have more angles to work with. It was really simple to take off the the pots and transfer them over to the enclosure.

I enclosure I used is a 125B, so it's not the smallest but it has enough room to fit everything nice and neat

Another trick I learned is to pre solder the link on the 3PDT switch. The result is much cleaner

I have two unsoldered lug cause I need to solder other wire in them

Since I designed the pedal to have a battery, I used some foam to push the battery against the switch. I did this because a battery will move around if it's not secured. And if it moves it might damage the insides.

Now it can hold a battery totally upside-down without falling out. It also doesn't make any sound when you shake the pedal.

This is why I used the cardboard trick. When I take out the pots, I can simply plop it into the enclosure so the only things I need to do is solder a couple wires. It also holds its shape great!

One of the first offboard soldering joints I made was at the DC adapter. Since it is really hard to fit 2 wires into the one hole, I decided to get that out of the way. What I did was put the wire coming from the board into the hole, then I grabbed another wire, not attached to anything, and fit it in. It seamed to work out well.

So the second wire coming from the DC adapter, that was originally not soldered to anything, goes to the bottom sides and....

.... is soldered to LED. In my last couple of post I talk about using a small board to hold the resistor that connects to the LED. This makes sure that it is solid

Here is the finished product. The battery fits nicely

As you can see I used the twisty wire technique again, it looks cool

The upper half of the enclosure looks good, the board is floating pretty well

Usually on my other builds, the DC jack is one of my weak points. This time I think it turned out great!

There is the switch that toggles between low gain and high gain

Now that looks sexy

And the yellow LED to mach the gold Marshall knob just looks killer

I used my letter stamps to label the knobs, volume and drive. When the toggle switch is down it's in low gain

and when it's up it is high gain. Pretty simple, down=low gain, up=high gain

This is the best pedal I have made so far in terms of neat soldering. I'll try and get a build report up by the end of the day, I still need to push the limits of this monster!

Red Llama in the process

This post has some pictures of current build, a Red Llama with mod, for a friend. Because I'm building this for someone and not for myself, I have pay extra attention to detail. Here are some photos and some ways to make sure there is a solid connection between the component and the board.

For all the builds on this site, I use IvIark's layouts. Go check out his site for amazing layouts!

Here is were I started off. I didn't document the drilling and linking of the board because it's not that important. When ever there is an IC included in the circuit, I like to use sockets. These are really useful because out of all the components, the IC has the most chance to get damaged. If this happens, I can simply remove the bad IC and put in a new one without heating up the soldering iron! Unless you use more than the required voltage, 9v from a batterie or power supply, than the chance of frying the IC is very slim.

The IC used in this pedal is a CMOS Hex Inverter (CD4049UBE) which has 16 pins.

With the pins being so close to each other, it is important not to make any solder bridges between the strips. If this happens, you can easily take an exacto knife and score the lines in between the copper strips. To make sure there are no solder bridges, I still cut the lines to be certain, even if the solder joints look good, which they do :P

With all the resistors, I used the volt meter to measure its value. Even though they come in labeled bags, I checked to make sure they are the right resistance and that they work correctly.

Here are some photos of the board with all the components in.

As you can see, everything is nice and neat, just the way I like it.

With ever build, my soldering skills increase tremendously. These are the best solder joints I've ever done!

The mod that I am doing is not to complicated. Simply, the switch can switch between two resistors which as a results increases the gain of the pedal.

To switch between two components, the easiest way is to get a DPDT on/on toggle switch. Them Solder the two components to the outer lugs and leave the two middle lugs blank, like in the photo. Now the two middle lugs will have wire coming out of them that connects to the original placement of the resistor, like in the diagram above.

I soldered the resistors so that they are out of the way and are unexposed.

These are only a few of the many techniques I used to make sure that I soldered the components correctly. I'm trying to put as much care into this project as possible so the friend I am making it for is pleased and impressed with the level of craftsmanship. 

Just got parts!

Living in Canada is fantastic, but it makes shipping parts really frustrating. Luckily I found a great dealer: Mammoth Electronics. The parts I ordered are for a Red Llama, that I'm building for a friend, and a Zvex Box of Rock. I've already built the Red Llama before and it sound great. As for the Box of Rock, I have heard countless good things about this pedal. It's also not that big of a build so I thought I would give it a shot! 

Since I got the parts mailed it to me, I can now start building! I promise pictures will be coming soon of my newest build. Be sure to keep checking this site because it's summer and I have a load of free time to publish my pedal adventures.

Phase 90 mods

In the summer on 2012 I was looking into a phase pedal. The obvious choice was the Phase 90 by MXR. Now they have a huge selection of phaser pedals. Sadly the one I wanted, script reissue with LED and DC power jack, was pretty expensive. The regular phase 90 was a lot less expensive compared to the script ones. I don't know how but I stumbled across this thing call the script mod. So I've heard of pedal mods before. But I never knew that it was that simple. The Script Mod was basically removing the R28 resistor from the circuit. All I had to do was cut off one of the legs of that resistor. I really like the idea of being able to have a more vintage sounding phaser, but what if I wanted to switch back to the original design if I didn't like it or if the song demanded it. This is where I got the idea of putting in a switch. I'm really glad I put in this switch. To this day I still switch between the stock and script switch to change up the sound. I did this mod last summer and since then I decided to do another mod to the Phase 90, but I'll get into that a little later. Currently my Phase 90 has 2 switches on it. One is the script mod and the other is a tremolo mod. Here are some pictures of my modded phase 90. I'll also give some tips I learned along the way with modding. 

So here it is in its beauty

The V represents vintage and that drawing is just to say what I have done with the circuit. I can switch between having the R28 resistor in or out.

Taking out the PCB isn't that difficult but putting it back in is

Here is the solder side of the PCB. Don't mind the two wires, thats for the tremolo mod

You have to take off all of the nuts before you can take out the board...

....even the jacks

So here I have two tightly fit switches between components

This I believe is a bias knob. DO NOT TURN IT. This will change the sweep and make it sound uneven

Here is the switch for the script mod. I put electrical tape around it to make sure it doesn't short circuit.

There is the placement of the R28. Just above the output jack.

As you can see I desoldered one leg of the resistor and lifted it up.

What you want to do is have a SPST switch. I had to just snap off one leg so when it's in that position the resistor is removed. Have one wire that goes from one lug to the empty whole. Have the next wire that is soldered to the second lug be soldered to the other end of the resistor. This diagram explains it pretty well...I think.

The placement of the switch is important. You want a space that has a low profile so the switch can fit without putting stress on the board.

Next you would want to drill a whole accordingly. 

This is the next mod I decided to do, it's called the Tremolo mod. I found this in the Wampler book of pedal modifications. It's a great book, thats where I found the mod for my Marshall Guv'nor. This mod does as it's supposed to do, tremolo. But in my experience, it has kinda like a univibe characteristic to it. It does phase but it also swells the volume like a tremolo. The one thing that makes this mod not perfect is that at the peak of volume it almost distorts a little. But I can't really tell in the moment.

The mod was to put a 0.1uf cap to touch these two points in the circuit.

For the switch, what I did was have the .1uf cap flush against it for minimal space occupied

As for the placement of the two wires, one wire is attached to one lug of the switch, the other wire is soldered to one leg of the cap, and the other leg of that cap is soldered to the other lug on the switch. I hope thats not confusing. So I have the switch itself on top and the solder on the back. 

 So I can very easily take the two wires and bend the around the corner place where there is room.

Then the switch rests in-between some transistors

A vey snug fit!

So this is my phase 90. I never thought that I could do two mods but look at it now. It's a very versatile pedal for only one knob!

If you have any questions or comments about these mods, please leave them in the comment section below. 

Distortion plus just sounds great!

I was listening to some early Queen and I thought to myself that the driven tone Brian may uses on some of his tunes are just pure distortion. So I decided to get my first build out, the MXR Distortion plus with Wampler mods. I have to say, when I was playing White Man, on A Day At The Races, with this pedal, I really enjoyed the sound I was getting. This kind of sound was just pure distortion tone. I'm just so glad my first build still works like a charm. A lot of people build the Distortion plus as their first build. It's an excellent pedal. I absolutely recommend as this as a first build!