Bringing it all home: the reason for blackcraft

When I was first learning about pedals I was intrigued by Oliver Ackermann's Armageddon.  No doubt you could tell because of my cloning of his artwork. Over the course of my time messing around populating other people's PCBs i've taken some time to try and breadboard various designs all thanks to my good friend Micah over at Glass Hero.  To him i owe very much as he has been patient with me and dropped tidbits of information for me to learn from.

So after thinking about it for a long time, I've decided to try and build the original 7 transistor fuzz war.  this has reportedly given many people problems. Without knowing what they've done wrong I've decided to take a stab at building one myself.

I've got the schematic in hand and I've got some experience playing around with reverse transistor setups and have figured what the heck...

Here is the infamous 7 transistor schematic most people have probable seen. The starting point...

I've seen both this and the armageddon v1 pedal and they are based around the same circuit but have a couple notable differences.

Here is what I've re-drafted to identify stages and a more suitable looking schematic for me to follow.

And here it is on the breadboard...

Ahh but then there is the issue of variability, using some OEM motorola 2n5089s and the boost stage has huge sputtering issues...

This is probably the issue that others have run into.