DOD Gonkulator Modulator (not for the soft stomachs)

[downweverything]

i located my gonkulator modulator and opened it to attempt to clone it and i suddenly realized i might be getting into more than i bargained for.  anyway the thing has quite a few more parts than i remember.  (3 dual 4558 opamps, 32 caps, a 1496 14pin dip, a 14007 14 pindip, 8 diodes, 60 resistors, 7 transistors, 4 pots, an led, and a trim pot to be exact, whew :shock: ).  anyway, the traces are like microscopic, (less than 1mm).  does anybody have a clue how to tackle this and make a layout that is a humanly solderable size without deriving a schematic and making a entirely new one?  im just in shock and wondering if this is even a worthy cause.  is anyone still interested in this beast considering it is going to cost more to clone than it would be to buy?  i bought mine for like $29 new but i see they are more now after being out of production for a while.

[cd]

In some places, they're quite sought after - I've seen them for $200CDN in vintage stores ($150US) which of course is outrageous... only because the guy from Radiohead (or some other trendy band from 3-4 years ago) admitted to using it on a certain song.  It's a terrible sounding pedal (which it's supposed to be) but IMHO it has a lot of shortcomings.  The oscillator for the ring modulator leaks through like crazy, no matter where you put the ring mod setting, it's always there.

I remember tracing the circuit, I may have it on paper somewhere.  If I can find it I'll redraw it and post it.  IIRC there's lots of stuff but most of it was the switching circuitry, the rest was nothing special - ignore the stuff that branches out from the switching FETs and you should be OK.

A better pedal to build/clone would be the DOD Buzz Box - made for the guy from the Melvins, sought after because of Skunk Anasie's popularity a few years ago.  Horrible, horrible sounding pedal - could be simulated with a DOD Blue Box and Fender Blender in parallel.

[zachary vex]

weird that they need that many parts to do so little.

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

weird that they need that many parts to do so little.

An engineer is someone who, with 10 parts costing $5, can do what any fool can do with 100 parts costing $50
I must confess, there are a lot of parts in my Blue Ringer (I'm building a batch of 20 at the moment..)

[zachary vex]

weird that they need that many parts to do so little.

An engineer is someone who, with 10 parts costing $5, can do what any fool can do with 100 parts costing $50
I must confess, there are a lot of parts in my Blue Ringer (I'm building a batch of 20 at the moment..)

i think what happened is that they let someone loose on the project who had half an idea and even less background on the subject, and suddenly discovered there WASN'T ANY ROOM FOR AN ADJUSTABLE-PITCH CARRIER.  cough-cough.  heh.  8^)

[Ansil]

weird that they need that many parts to do so little.

An engineer is someone who, with 10 parts costing $5, can do what any fool can do with 100 parts costing $50
I must confess, there are a lot of parts in my Blue Ringer (I'm building a batch of 20 at the moment..)

i believe this statement, unfortuneately,  they let the anyfool build what the engineer has designed, resulting in complete and udder, pandemonium