My homemade spring reverb and tremolo box from scratch

[darklife]

When I say from scratch, I mean it
Springs came from two toy children's plastic echo mics found at a thrift shop along with the project box which was some weird tool box that needed modifying, circuit designed by gaining ideas from other designs around on the web all tested section by section on breadboard before soldering up.
Push buttons, power transformer, knobs, cord, jacks.. all from the bone yard.
Labels were printed then clear taped on each side, glued on, and clear coat sprayed over it many times. Kind of cheesy but it's what I have to work with.

Show and tell time:

-Tilt Tone is a real tilt equalizer to control spring twang and overall tone going through them.
-Limiter LED only comes on when springs are overdriven, which means the current incandescent bulb+LDR are limiting the spring drive. The bulb itself helps relieve over-current (found in tube type reverbs), and the LDR further dampens it when driven to extreme levels. This allows anything from guitar level to line level inputs to drive the springs without distortion. To my knowledge I am the only person to combine both of these methods into one unit.
-Lo cut is for guitar, when unpressed the springs work well into the deep bass range, good for synthesizer playing.
-Position button either puts the tremolo before or after the spring reverb, rarely seen button on most pedals I have seen combining both tremolo and reverb. I couldn't decide which position in the audio chain I liked the sound better so I made a button for it.

Picture of it sitting on top of my older DIY 25 watt guitar amp


In/Out jacks


Reverb/Tremolo switch jacks, when stomp switch is plugged in it disengages the front panel push buttons so no player confusion


Internal mess


DIY spring tank before adding better shielding and permanently gluing on transformer coils. Transformer windings are a mystery but they measure around 250ohm (send) and 600ohm (return) DC resistance if I recall, I simply took out the IE cores, hollowed them out some with a drill bit and turned them sideways, magnet glued to the spring ends does the rest


The whole picture album from beginning to end can be found here with descriptions of the progress over time, took close to a year to build mostly from being lazy and planning out things slowly..
http://imgur.com/a/RjGlT

I know the schematic (found in link above) is a mess because it was mostly my paper chalkboard while designing it. No plans anytime soon to make a professional schematic.
I actually joined this forum recently in hopes of finding other people who wanted to build a spring reverb but it looks like few do, and even less people making their own reverb tank. Yeah I could have spent money and used a quality tank and printed circuit board and so on, but total cost for everything was around $10 and mostly for the spray paint
I hope my project will inspire others to make their own.
Overall it sounds pretty darn good. I'll have to upload a video sometime of me playing through it.

[sergiomr706]

  looks interesting. I ll have to register imgur so i can view schematic. Thank you!

[darklife]

looks interesting. I ll have to register imgur so i can view schematic. Thank you!

Shouldn't have to register to view? I'll check the sharing settings..
edit: set it to public in imgurs settings, don't know if that will help.

[duck_arse]

vrrr interesting - I had no idea the tank/pickups could be made so easily. and that box - it has so much stuff in it that isn't the actual reverb line.

[GibsonGM]

That's really quite cool. 

[darklife]

Thanks for the warm reception so far folks. I was kind of worried about making this post because it's a biggie and took me a lot of time. I wish I had pictures of some of the older gear I made. I'm 32 y/o but I have been working on electronics and building my own stuff since I discovered how to shove a Christmas light bulb into a wall socket and fried myself at like 4 y/o.
I'll work on a schematic that looks nice in a while here for the box. Not like I am trying to hide my design, I am just a hobbyist and it's in my head, not paper.
I see things that I think could use some change in pedals and gear and learned long ago that you can scream and no one will hear you, or you can just roll your own

[darklife]

vrrr interesting - I had no idea the tank/pickups could be made so easily. and that box - it has so much stuff in it that isn't the actual reverb line.

Yeah the transducers are incredibly simple really. Just some old transformer cores plucked for high impedance. What seems to matter most when it comes to interference from outside noises and rumbling is how the pickups and magnets are polarized. Most reverb tanks use toroidal magnets to twist the spring rather than rattle it up/down. I didn't have the specialized magnets so I simply used ordinary magnets and glued on, it still works equally as well.
They do seem to have some twisting action even so maybe it's partially toroidal. Audio fidelity is equal across magnetic distance from the coil, only issue is strength drop. So the smaller the magnet or farther away the coil the more noise and amplification is needed to recover. These magnets I used are the size of ants so they fit nicely within the space to give in the departed transformer coil IE hole.
The biggest difference in sound quality is the dampeners and connection points of the springs to the end of the tank. Most manufactures seem to use hair thin metal. I used smaller springs. I find it works the same. Resonance is a serious issue at the ends of the spring and can dramatically change tone.
I've come to realize the key is to get that point correct. You can play with expensive or cheap long reverb springs all day and never get good sound if their end points are connected to something awful. The sound needs to ride off at the far ends without frequency padding, so whatever allows that is best. I found more springs very short work but introduce twang, manufactures use thin wire with rubber around them to dampen resonance at the ends but it's seriously the most important part of getting the sound right. Experimentation is key.

[moid]

Very cool looking project! On a vaguely related similar note I've got a lovely tall thin metal tin left over from some Christmas sweets that I'm hoping one day will house a small speaker and a tiny amp to drive it at one end of the box and a piezo pickup at the other end of the tin, with the hope that any sound played into it will bounce around the interior a bit before being picked up by the piezo and so will create a metallic reverb effect. Or not... I just need some time

[darklife]

Update:
Went ahead and drew up the schematic the old fashioned way. In the imgur album is a description as to how some of it works at the end.

[sajy_ho]

Cool! I was waiting for this for a loooooong time!
Can you make a demo of this? Thanks...

[thermionix]

Small point, but may I suggest a fuse on the mains side of your PT?

[EBK]

When I say from scratch, I mean it
Springs came from two toy children's plastic echo mics found at a thrift shop along with the project box which was some weird tool box that needed modifying, circuit designed by gaining ideas from other designs around on the web all tested section by section on breadboard before soldering up.
Push buttons, power transformer, knobs, cord, jacks.. all from the bone yard.

Went ahead and drew up the schematic the old fashioned way.

You are a brilliant badass.  Are you trying to make me cry happy tears? 

[darklife]

I hate this demo keep in mind but to give an idea how it sounds..
https://soundcloud.com/kagemichaels/tremoreverb

I was rather drunk trying to record this and no EQ or effects other than the box itself was used. You can actually hear me plucking the guitar in the background of my mic on the tremolo parts too which kind of sucks but oh well.
I obviously was not trying to play guitar, I was simply trying to show off the control features only. The distortion was brought to you by my shitty computer 

I'll make a much better review soon when I get in the mood to play some guitar or get a friend to play through it.

That was recorded with no dampening on the springs which is fairly noticeable with the resonant sounds. With slight padding on either end or both it sounds far different and more warm. I'll have to experiment more with that alone as it has a dramatic effect.

Thanks for the compliments everyone

[darklife]

Small point, but may I suggest a fuse on the mains side of your PT?

Good idea and yes, that will be implemented when I get around to measuring current draw to see what a safe value is. For now worst case scenario something goes bork and magic smoke releases and someone yanks the plug, but given the grounding and all the player should be safe from catastrophic idiocy.

[darklife]

When I say from scratch, I mean it
Springs came from two toy children's plastic echo mics found at a thrift shop along with the project box which was some weird tool box that needed modifying, circuit designed by gaining ideas from other designs around on the web all tested section by section on breadboard before soldering up.
Push buttons, power transformer, knobs, cord, jacks.. all from the bone yard.

Went ahead and drew up the schematic the old fashioned way.

You are a brilliant badass.  Are you trying to make me cry happy tears? 

Heh well thanks. I drew up the schematic that way because I was too lazy to find some decent linux or windows software that will run in wine to draw schematics. I have used software on linux in the past to do it but forgot what it's called after a reinstall years ago and went back to the stencil.
What is a good program to use for schematic drawing? I no longer use Windows as an operating system at all so looking for some good penguin alternatives but been out of the loop for a while.

[EBK]

In linux: geda, kicad, eagle....  Haven't used them recently though.

[thermionix]

Small point, but may I suggest a fuse on the mains side of your PT?

Good idea and yes, that will be implemented when I get around to measuring current draw to see what a safe value is. For now worst case scenario something goes bork and magic smoke releases and someone yanks the plug, but given the grounding and all the player should be safe from catastrophic idiocy.

I would be too lazy for math and science, and just try 500mA to start with.  I don't think that would blow during normal operation, but certainly would in the case of a shorted PT or something serious like that.

[sajy_ho]

I hate this demo keep in mind but to give an idea how it sounds..
https://soundcloud.com/kagemichaels/tremoreverb

I was rather drunk trying to record this and no EQ or effects other than the box itself was used. You can actually hear me plucking the guitar in the background of my mic on the tremolo parts too which kind of sucks but oh well.
I obviously was not trying to play guitar, I was simply trying to show off the control features only. The distortion was brought to you by my shitty computer 

I'll make a much better review soon when I get in the mood to play some guitar or get a friend to play through it.

That was recorded with no dampening on the springs which is fairly noticeable with the resonant sounds. With slight padding on either end or both it sounds far different and more warm. I'll have to experiment more with that alone as it has a dramatic effect.

Thanks for the compliments everyone

Nice demo man, thanks. I should build this...