Testing out etching

So i bit the bullet and tried out etching with Ferric Chloride.  It works, but is a little bit on the sloppy side.  Very much "space junk" kind of look.

Here is what the mask looked like.  I think I could have spent longer, it took me about 10 minutes of rotating it under the iron. My goal was to try and get the ink to show through the paper while I was ironing it.

Here is what the etch came out like after alternating dunking in Ferric Chloride and water for 20 minutes.

I scrubbed it after it had been through its last rinse, but it still retained some sort of rust look to it.  I can't seem to scrub it off, i'll have to see if it'll be an issue if I try and spray paint over it.  However it does look like the mask didn't entirely protect what it was supposed to.  Its all good, since I was going for a really beat up type of look.  I have to drill through the holes first and then test out spray painting it.

After cleaning off more of the gunk with a green scrubby pad and nail polish remover it looks a a lot nicer

After this I hit it with a base of flat black and then topped it off proceeded to wet sand the raised parts.  It appears that the Ferric Chloride didn't come out as clean of a process as I had hoped, but I like the aesthetic that it has going on.  Using a reverse etch to invert the color of the text like on the tone stacks doesn't seem to work that well either.  I think i'll just go with raising the text. As you can see the large Aluminum exposed areas have major holes in them...

I was debating whether or not to coat it with anything, I got some great advice to clear coat it with stuff from the automotive department from Cody (CHECK OUT HIS AWESOME BLOG!), and another Madbeaner DMinner (MAKES SOME REALLY GREAT ETCHES) said it might be fine with out it.  After holding the pedal for a little bit, it became clear that it was still rubbing blackness off onto my hands.  So i used some of the Krylon Gloss Clear coat that I had around and laid it on there.  In person the light hits the metallic flakes in the paint and it looks great!

And the guts

And testing out another one for a friend...

This one was at first red, but too bright so i tried spraying some black at a distant over it all and it came out to be a pretty awesome darkened red color.

Update 08APR2016

If you have to use Kinkos to print (as I did) then here is the paper you should ask for them to print on.

"Gloss White"

Simple switch between big muff and supa tonebender using Madbean's Mudbunny board.

Check carefully, but its all about the 100nf cap.

lifting the miller cap will not do what we want it to do!

Basically we do is move c6 to be switched in and out of the circuit using an SPDT.

This is what was done for the "Screaming Firebat" pedal.

7 Transistor Armageddon

Prototype board in a 1590BB

3d view of the prototype board

reverse boosting

Working on the fuzzwar and there have been some issues with transistors.  So i've been messing around with the reverse booster and came up with something that works pretty stable for the 2n5089s that I have.

I think the 51K is alright so far, I think that a 10k instead of the 51k is better for impedance, but 51k is a lot louder at this point and gets close to the sound of the 7 transistor fuzz war.

I'll have to see how they stack together though, with both the 10k or 15k the bass frequencies clip more. But obviously not as much as the 51k.  At 100k, theres some gating and the start of that velcro sound, 180 is entirely gated and velro-esque... 

Getting back into screen printing

Well its been a while since i screen printed anything.  I've been working on a design for quite some time and trying to get the circuit to match. I know I know, I really should figure out the circuit first before making artwork for pedals, but this time I'm going to do the right amount of planning!

So this is my heavily modified big muff design with different clipping options.

Its not my finest, I goofed on the upper right hand corner.  The screen had a lot of holes in it and I just left it.  It looks OK enough and I'm just trying out some ideas at the moment.  I'm going to put the 9V and INPUT and BYPASS in red , and I'm going to try to put an image on the side to take it a step further than I usually do.  But this will require a large amount of back and forth in terms of clearcoating, drying and screen printing.  Ah well hopefully its worth it.  I'll keep you guys posted in terms of what the result slowly develops into.

The circuit was previously housed in this

But I kind of botched that enclosure and right now a friend is borrowing it, and since I had another enclosure that I've just been sitting on for a year, I wanted to try some more artwork out..

Here was an earlier version with the red knobs...

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.

Filter filterrrr

Working on a filter from another pedal and trying to figure out just how it works. Here is the schematic,

ANd here is my attempt to use the tone stack calculator