Here are some shots of a late period JHS FZ111 FUZZ -
I probably should have kicked off with some of the more famous early pedals - I'll get round to a decent posting with reference shots of my early Zonk Machine another time but was just commenting on another fairly scruffy example of the FZ111 elsewhere on the forum so decided to run some quick shots of my nice example to get this thread rolling:
As can be seen it's Italian made and pretty cheaply done at that - look at the way the board is kind of held in place by its wire attachments to the pots and jacks! - a piece of folded foam stops the whole thing from catching fire (well shorting anyway!) or having the otherwise potentially mobile parts attacking each other..
It's a Pescara made (Jen) model so has almost no lineage whatsoever to its illustrious ancestors but it can give some decent tones although hard to find - rather a shrill and unbalanced setup - a decent ammount of gain and volume - easily enough to kick any reasonable amp into feedback but I am struggling to find anything nice to say about it other than it is very clean - nice to find one with the foam inserts left inside the box and te instructions as well (if you have one or the matching phaser and need a copy of the instructions then drop me a line and I'll send you a nice high res copy) - OH! and it didn't cost me a great deal - somewhere around a ton as I recall (that's £100 for our cousins over the pond!).
G
Sorry about the load times but hopefully it's worth it to get some nice pics stashed online. G
Well I don't disagree that the cast case is a big help and I do have a reasonable selection of the other italian TB's - most of which I still own on account of their being good sounding examples - my point was that the JHS one is just thrown together and appears to have had absolutely no effort expended on getting any components to work well together or biassed / matched in any reasonable way - generally bad or indifferent sounding or scruffy pedals get moved on once I can find a better example but this one was so clean that I kept it (though with this one it was a close run thing!) I never claimed any technical knowhow but it does seem to me that the sound quality of Italian fuzzes deteriorated - particularly as you got towards the latter seventies and into the eighties - maybe I just got unlucky but thats just how I read it!
The circuit is absolutely identical in both the JHS and the Vox and if you look at the track side of the pcb you will find printed "JEN 280.054" on both.
You are right that there was no selection of components - but this was not done in any of the fuzzes of that time. The important thing was only that it should distort the signal. Therefore everything what was available for cheap was used.
".....the electronic musical market was so hot that you could take five pounds of dog shit, put it in a paper bag and if you could get it to make a sound, you could sell it as a musical instrument."
I think the sound can get much more bottom end by replacing the only cap in green in the Vox unit by a higher value between 100nF and 1µF, depending on your taste.
Another suggestion is to change the 10nF capacitor near the yellow cap to a value between 47nF and 100nF.
Graham, The freakin' foam looks like it left the factory yesterday! What a great example for your archives.
The lock washers under the pots look like Kung Fu Shurikins wielded by diminutive (or vertically challenged)
Mid-Jin-Nits.
Your collection blows my mind___________repeatedly!
“Of the demonstrably wise there are but two: those who commit suicide, and those who keep their reasoning faculties atrophied by drink.” Mark TwGL
I will put up the rest of the JHS pedals in the coming days - there are some new biggie pictures of my JHS stash (also my main Brit fuzz stash come to that) on decadeoffuzz.com - (where I also wrote an update - first in a year!! - on the status of the fuzziness project) but I'll load them onto my photobucket account and then I'll be able to link them here.
Anyone checking them out will see I've had some dealings with Leon - Thanks Man!! Hope you enjoyed Nice and the Lancia!!
and that you made it up to Vence.
Amongst them is the most unusual pedal I think I ever saw - its a JHS Hornblower "Accord-O-Mix" not exactly sure it is anything really in the Fuzziness line but way weird - When I get the gut shots done you will see what I mean - Also Im looking for info on the small Bass Booster - I've had a JHS-1 Treble Booster (yes it will be detailed here) for a while now courtesy of Gino but only just got the Bass version - A friend said that it had been part of someone famous's pedal board - regular lead player but using the Bass rather than Treble Booster - I've lost the mail so any info on either of these two mentioned pedals gratefully received.
On the missing data dump stuff - I think that if somebody "clever" could lift stuff directly from the old forum then an awful lot of it would be restored - I know the bulk of my "Detailed" postings were over there and most still are.. At least half of mine were here but obviously were pulled - Lifting them across individually is a pig due to all the formatting - perhaps I can get them over as "plain text" but it would be cool if someone could do it including the formatting and links - afraid it is beyond my tech abilities -- probably why I like pre '80 pedals - But I am sure that theres a bunch of "handy" lads here who could manage that little task blindfolded!!
I had one of those blue JHS fuzz's for couple weeks and thought its sounded awful.. Very harsh and thin even compared to a vox tonebender.
They do look cool though...
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