Pictures!

[Valoosj]

A friend of mine plays piano and he wanted a pedal so I'm building him one 

Inside it will have a volume pot (otherwise it wouldn't work with the synth/piano) a wah, phaser, fuzz factory, echo base, lofo mofo and a bit crusher.

[Dragonfly]

...that included two funerals and a migraine that I'm still dealing with, I decided I needed to build something to occupy me ...not easy, given the migraine, but I had to get things done.

Anyway, here it is - straight FF clone, but I did this one with BC183 transistors. BC183's are in some of my favorite FF's, but it seems that not too many were made. Everyone knows the more common BC108 and BC109 versions. In fact, Dallas Arbiter used BC108, BC109, BC182L, BC183, and BC209's in various versions ! Enough about that. Anyway, I'm not a huge fan of trim pots - the last thing I want to do is plug in at a gig and have my FF sound bad because a trimmer slipped - so I simply used the proper value resistor in place of the 8k2. I wouldn't do this on a germanium version, but for a silicon I feel it's the best way to go. Anyway, this one sounds unbelievable !

I'll shut up now....

LONG SOUND CLIP...EXCUSE THE CRAPPY PLAYING !

[Fl!P]

Looks good inside and out.
Sounds cool, too.

Nice!

[John Lyons]

Nice board! Sounds great, dig the clean up...

[frequencycentral]

Red Star Drive - my submini pentode take on the Trotsky Drive.

More photos, schematics and soundclips here: http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=71350.0

[Fl!P]

Red Star Drive ...

I've got to hand it to you Rick, you just  keep pouring them out.

Keep 'em comin'!

[awitee]

Four Knobbed Rat with switch for led or diode clipping, 4th knob is the reutz mod
used a tl071 ic, removed the 30pf cap
sounds great, still have to experiment with the 4th knob a bit

[earthtonesaudio]

Rick-the guts of that Red Star Drive look great!
awitee-that red border looks great with the rest of the pedal!

[CoolJohnny]

[/quote]

oh my friggin gawd how did you get that ground effect light thing??? ive got to do that!!!!

[liddokun]

oh my friggin gawd how did you get that ground effect light thing??? ive got to do that!!!!
[/quote]

Valoosj's got a tutortial up somewhere on the forum on how to do it.  Just search for light emitting border tutorial.  It's quite simple, a piece of plexiglass and an embedded LED, but the effects are great, as you can see from the awesome looking pedal above. 

[awitee]

yup! i just followed the tutorial

[tommy.genes]

That paint job combined with the glow of the red border made me think of this...



-- T. G. --

[davent]

Hello,

While sitting under a tree, out of the summer sun waiting for a bus in front of the health food store with my tofu and vitamins, a nicely done up two-tone 40's something coupe cruised by giving me the idea for a potential pedal paint job.

Inside... Orman/Keen tag team, an AMZ Mosfet Booster/Millenium II Switch.

Performs as advertised, clean boost and the LED turns on/off !

dave

[John Lyons]

N  I  C  E  !
Great paint job!
Lock washers on the jacks/flush jack nuts,
metal stomp washer, recessed LED...love it.

How did you do the layers and pin stripe?
All paint or was the stripe decal?
Do tell.. 

[frank_p]

Yes ! Really great paint job Dave !

[davent]

Thanks guys!

This ones all paint. Used Auto-Air Colors, have lots on hand, they're an acrylic paint... no nasty fumes. Clear base, black base, white base and pearlized gold. Using an Iwata airbrush to apply.  With this paint too, you can cure it with a hot air gun for a minute and half and then move onto the next coat. So you paint cure, paint cure...a pretty quick process.

After priming the box  (used appliance spray epoxy paint) sprayed it with clear base coat then black base coat, then more clear base. They suggest using the clear when you're going to be masking areas off. Maybe some indecision here as to where i wanted to go with this.

Applied masking tape to the top and sides then with a small square, ruler and razor knife trimmed the tape into the shape i wanted to end up being gold.  Ran 1/16" tape around the perimeter of the masking tape, this will be the black lines seperating the two colors.  Sprayed more black to cover all the outside edges of the thin orange tape, this was to stop the next color from bleeding under the tape and messing up the black line. The black paint should get in there first and fill the gaps. (Clear paint would also do the trick.)

Now applied more masking tape to seal the gap between the orange tape and the masking tape to prevent the white I'll be spraying next from ruining those areas.

OK...next sprayed all the unmasked areas (pretty much everything ended up being) white.

Removed the wrap around mask and applied masks for the in/out triangle arrows. (Clearcoat here.) Once masked, held a card close to the edge of the mask opening, card's held away from the surface of the box (gives a diffuse edge rather then a sharp one plus you get underspray) and sprayed a white edge to the three edges of the opening. Took the triangle masks away then took a very thin tape (maybe 1/64" wide) and outlined the triangles with that. And I'm still having fun.

Peeled  the last of the masking tape off leaving the thin orange tape between the black/white areas and left the thin black tape outlining the triangles.

Loaded up the airbrush with more clear base and gave it a couple coats to hopefully seal all the tape edges. (Cure after every coat.)

Now we're getting somewhere. Spray the gold, I focused on the edges/corners of the box, the white areas, so a great deal of the paint on the black is really just the overspray from doing the edges. Some light coats to the black to darken the gold color but would say mostly overspray covering up the black.

Peeled off the remaining tape and it looked pretty good. Did do a bit of touchup with a very fine paint brush to some of the black areas but didn't need to do too much.

Used lacquer as the final clearcoat. This Auto-Air paint is watersoluble so if you don't get something durable onto it it will be destroyed in no time. With all the painting i did after masking the black lines the lines ended up as very deep canyons and it took over twenty coats of the lacquer (gingerly wet sanding back often) to get it all flat and level. With lacquer i was allowing at least an hour between coats.

I guess that's about it for the anal annals. Thanks
dave

[liddokun]

Very nice!

[RedHouse]

Where do you get those blue Phillips capacitors?

I was doing a resto on a old early 80's JCM800 that had some blue caps like that, would be nice to replace the original (leakers) with look-alikes.

[Auke Haarsma]

Awesome! Really like it!

[nordine]

i liker this one better than the final one   



reminds me of a nike shoe