What is on your workbench Tinkerers?

[Nick]

An eBay seller recently accepted my lowball offer of £225 for the first version JMI/Vox Treble Booster (... yeah, even just of the chrome rectangular thingies, there are loads of different British-built and American-built models with different enclosures, graphics and parts). As per usual, it came DOA despite the seller's claim of "great condition for its age". I did some careful disassembly of the booster, began probing, and quickly discovered that the toggle switch wasn't connecting -9v to the board. Some much more careful disassembly of the switch itself revealed that the contact for the battery wire was weirdly corroded inside (even though the solder joint outside looked completely fine). I gave the contact a good scrub with a q-tip and some isopropyl alcohol, reassembled the whole thing, and it lives once again!

Before & after:

[dancehall]

First time doing off-board wiring. I have a newfound respect for those of you who make pedals this way, it’s a bit tricky and mind-bending. Every little thing wants to be grounded, god damn. Tomorrow I’ll wire in the circuit board and see if it works!

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[caiofilipini]

Good stuff! Everyone started somewhere.

[squarewave]

I bloody built a one knob fuzz and a super hard on. And they both work!!
I know very little about electronics and I have tried and failed many times! Quite chuffed with myself, onward.

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[Dr Tony Balls]

Nice!

[Nick]

I'm on a bit of a long-term restoration project at the moment. Here's how the fuzz box looked when I got it:



The previous owner had chopped out all the apparently broken bits and discarded them, and this being the best fuzz box to come out of the 1960s, I wasn't gonna settle with brand new bits if it could be helped.

I harvested another Arrow switch from an early Colorsound wah (sorry!) and I'm really happy with how it looks, both inside and outside. I also did an operation which I devised with another Project V where I set the power arrangement up in such a way that I could actually use the pedal with a modern 9v battery, but if for whatever reason things got really absurd and I wanted to use the obsolete long cylindrical 8.4v batteries that these pedals were intended for, then one of those would still be usable. Basically I found some cheap new battery contacts that were close to the dimensions of the original sort, bent them into shape, and then attached them to the case using the existing holes. I then wired up these fixed battery terminals to the main circuitry of the pedal (using the the correct mix of red and grey colours!), and also hooked up some modern PP3 snaps via solder tags to those new fixed terminals. In short, we've now got two different power options running in parallel, without making any further modifications to the electronics or the enclosure.

The widow who sold this pedal to me had a pair of grimy old knobs that were apparently stored together with the pedal. They're definitely not original, and they're pretty ugly too, but until I can find a pair of rare WEM knobs (the circular type, without the pointer), these'll have to do. This very specific version of the WEM Project V would have also had mismatched pots to begin with. It would be pretty easy to stick in an old AB pot of the same sort as the existing volume control, and it would look great, but it simply wouldn't be forensically-perfect. I need to find a Morganite and this will probably take a few years. I also need to make a new cover for the 'battery hatch' out of a small rectangle of steel, and I don't have the tools for that (yet). So yeah, pedal works again! and sounds amazing as expected! ... but there's more work still to be done

[daCod]

Bad. Ass.

[Radiotron]

Nice one Nick! Loving all the recent projects!

[Radiotron]

Actually quite like those knobs tbh