Offboard soldering the Kalamazoo

The hardest part of this build was putting everything into this enclosure. The start of fitting everything in is drilling the holes in the right place. 

Here is an over view of the placement of all the offborad components

For the input jacks I made it so it's the closest it can be without it touching the back plate. The DC jack is also pretty high. I tried to make it so there is a lot of space between the board and the other components.

On the other side I have the output jack, LED, and the bypass switch. I wanted to push everything to the side so I can fit a batterie in the enclosure. This area is a pretty crowded area so I made sure ever measurement was precise.

Here is a look at the enclosure with everything in it. As you can see, the batterie fits nice and snug. The board isn't too deep into enclosure and it has a small profile.

 Recently I got some letter punches. They give the pedal a very DIY feel

 And if they don't match up or are not perfectly strait it looks even better

 I really hit that 1 hard

The knobs look spaced out enough and the LED and bypass switch that are off to the side look pretty sweet

 This is a photo of the back plate. It's the KALAMAZOO OD, made in 2013 and has my initials

The one thing you sure keep in mind with this step is the placement of the board. The board is the focus of the piece  and everything should be positioned around it. In this pedal I made sure that everything was a far away from the board so that  I will have room for my soldering iron when soldering the pots.



The second part is soldering all the wires that need to be soldered. This is pretty much the final step. When off board soldering you really want to make sure that all the wires are all routed along the sides of the enclosure. I start it off every time with the LED and grounding. I strongly suggest you have you CLR (Current Limiting Resistor) on a strip of board. This will keep it sturdy and it won't move around.

I use the Red wire for the 9 volts coming it, and the black wire for ground. It's a little hard to see but what I have done is actually melt the shielding onto the board. This gives it a sort of strain relief when I move the wire around.

This is the smartest way, in my opinion, to solder the CLR

This takes up just a small part of the space.

I note I made to myself is to solder some of the bypass switch when it's not bolted on. This will make the solder joints a lot cleaner. I didn't do that in this one

All the wires that need to go to the other side of the enclosure are routed on the bottom side. This will give room for the battery.

Before putting the board in, on the layout sheet, there is usually some pot lugs that need to go to the output or the ground. Do that before you solder in the board.

I've left the DC jack unsoldered because the 9v and G coming out of the board need to be soldered directly to the DC jack

For most drive/gain pots, lugs 2 and 3 have to be connected. Instead of  using another wire, you can use pliers to bend them together. They you just need to use a bit of solder to solder them together. Make sure to leave space for a wire to pass through the lug.

Here is another simple connection I made using a short piece of wire.

The board needs to have a series of wires coming out of it to supply the input, 9v, ground, and pots. I like to keep it colour coated so I don't get anything confused.

Soldering the 2 pots underneath the board was the hardest part because you have to keep the board elevated while you solder the wires under it. I used helping hand to lift up the board. It helped to cut the  wire to length.

Soldering the DC jack was a bit difficult and I probably should have routed the wires in a more neat fashion, but what done is done.

Here is the finished product.

I fit's a battery pretty snugly. The wires aren't in the way of anything so I did a good job there.

The wiring inside the pedal is more of an aesthetic thing more then a functionality thing. My father said there is ALWAYS room for improvement, sometimes as a joke but it's true. I made a couple mistakes in this pedal and now I know what to do next time to make it even better. Next time I'm going to try and bend the wires in more right angles and solder the bypass switch before putting it into the pedal. The build report will be coming up soon. 

If you have any questions or comments, go ahead and write them down below

Lovepedal Kalamazoo

The last couple days, I've been working on the Lovepedal Kalamazoo overdrive. For the last two pedals I've made, I did a complete step by step on building the pedal. This time I thought I would just really focus on the more important stuff like offboard wiring. So here are some photos of the Kalamazoo so far.

So here I have soldered in the diodes. At first I thought that I would socket the diodes for less hassle. But then I realized that I'm pretty good at soldering so I would take a crack at it.

The Kalamazoo uses germanium diodes. Germanium diodes are very sensitive to heat. So after every time I solder a diode, I use my continuity tester to see if it still functions properly.

 I decided to bend the electrolytic capacitors to make it easier to place everything in enclosure.

 I got these really cool letter punches from Lee Vally. It gives a very interesting look to the pedal

How does the Red Llama work?

I've always found electronics interesting. Yet when I found out that average components like resistors, capacitors, and diodes could be used in configuration to make an effect, I asked myself...how does it work? This is how I got the idea for this post. In this post, I will be explaining how the Way Huge Red Llama works. I built this pedal about a week ago and I can say it is a pretty sweet sounding overdrive/fuzz hybrid.

The Red Llama is actually a clone itself with some component changes. The original designer of the circuit is Craig Anderson. In an interview with Jeorge Tripps, creator of the way huge line, he said that he had bought this book called "Electronic Projects for Musicians" written by Craig Anderson. He also said that the first pedal he built was the Tube Sound Fuzz that was that book. Once I heard that this book existed, I quickly got it. In this book, Craig Anderson talks about the circuit. He explains how it works, why it works, and the reason it sounds so good.

These pictures just give a kind of overview of the circuit and talks a little bit about the sound

In the "background" section of the page, he talks about the use of field effect transistors or FET for distortion that has tube qualities. But in this project, he does't use FET transistors. The main amplifying section of this circuit is a CMOS hex inverter.

Most overdrive circuits use an amplifier. Either an op-amp (tube screamer) or a transistor (Lovepedal COT 50). The same way if you push a tube amp, it will overdrive, if you push and op-amp or FET it will do the same. 

The CMOS 4049 IC chip has multiple amplifiers in it. This pedal only uses two.

The best way to analyze a circuit is to look at the schematic. Luckaly, Craig Anderson gave it to us in his book

Basically there is two amplifying stages to this circuit. The first one amplifies the input signal and the second one will get overloaded and gets distorted. The picture of text also explains what all the other components do. 

This last piece of text he speaks highly of his creation. It really is a very nice effect, it is a tube sounding fuzz.

All the pieces of text that I have pictures of is from this section "how it works" 

Another thing I want to do with this post is show what the wave form looks like on an oscilloscope. I was very fortunate that my high school was able to let me borrow an oscilloscope from their physics lab. I've had a lot of fun playing around with this thing. 

I like to use my function generator as the input of the effect so I can see a nice and clean wave form. I keep it at 440Hz just cause thats an A on a guitar

From the function generator, or wave form generator, there are two cable that come out of it. The ground, black, and the signal, red. Since the pedal uses 1/4 inch jacks, I need to hook up the two probes to the jacks like so

The oscilloscope also has two probes but the configuration is different. There is one hook type thing, the signal, and the ground, alligator clip

After everything is hooked up properly, I just need to attach cables to and from the pedal

The bypassed signal is a nice and simple sign wave

The cool thing about this pedal it how dynamic it is.

On the wave form generator, there is a knob that controls the amplitude or the strength of the signal. This knob would be equivalent to your playing dynamics. 

This photo show the wave form with a very small amplitude, almost like you are barely strumming the guitar

And with the amplitude turned up some more the wave takes more of a square wave shape but not quite there yet

With the amplitude in the middle, the wave is fairly square. All fuzz boxes have a square wave form

With the level of the wave form set kinda high, the corners of the wave get sharper 

Depending on what pickups you use and the dynamic of your playing style, the signal will get more distorted. The pictures above had the same gain setting but just with a different amplitude. 

The gain on this pedal is not too monstrous. But it does have a great tone to it. These next pictures will show the gain knob in its full spectrum with the amplitude on the function generator set the same

Really pay attention to the corners of the wave.

This is my favourite setting. It gives a real nice crunch to your amp

The volume knob on this thing is incredible. It is really ear shattering it get's so loud.

This next photo is of the volume knob all the way up. The wave actually goes off the screen. You might be able to see the fait green lines near the top

To see the top of the wave, I had to switch the volts per division switch. So the scale of this smaller than the scale of the other pictures

I'm really glad I was able to do this. I learned a lot in the process. There is still a lot that is still confusion about audio electronics. But now I can say that I know how a CMOS hex inverter pushes the signal into overdrive to achieve a tube sound fuzz!