I thought it would be fun to pretend to be a kid in 1966 whose parents refused to get them a fuzz box from the store, and follow what I believe is the earliest DIY pedal project out there: Mark Scibor-Rylski's fuzz box as published in the July 1966 issue of Practical Electronics
My intention was to try to maintain as much of the 1966 vibe as possible. The layout of the parts and the hardware is more or less still the same, but of course I couldn't help taking matters into my own hands in making some adjustments to the design:
1) The original design was very much not true bypass, and so I've corrected that for my clone. Instead of the unfuzzed guitar signal still going through the input cap and the output volume control, the bypassed sound goes straight to the output socket and the circuit input is sent to ground.
2) Scibor-Rylski suggests implementing an output filter to tame the harshness of this beast, and he's right. This thing is NASTY, even by 1960s standards. I couldn't get any good results out of the Pi-filter in the magazine and so I used Jack Orman's simple tone circuit instead.
3) Instead of grounding the circuit to the enclosure via the jack sockets, I did the Sola Sound-y thing where it's all grounded at a single point at the board (via a brass standoff).
I also tried some general things that were new to me, to varying degrees of success
:1) I have a rivet gun! as you can see from the pics, I'm also having a lot of fun with it
2) As I mentioned in my previous build report, I was keen to try my hand at painting enclosures. One challenge is that I live upstairs in an apartment, and so I obviously can't start spraying stuff around. I got a lil can of brush-on Hammerite and did some experimentation and....... fuck that shit. I'm gonna have to negotiate with the neighbours a time to use the communal space to spray future projects because brushing is a lot of hassle.
The OC71 transistors that I used for this project were kindly gifted to me by an internet-friend, and so I did the totally normal thing in making a second one of these monstrosities to give back :) Anyway, pics!
and how about a dubious demo?! (sorry for clipping the input again.....)
SO MANY SOUNDS!!!
