Sputnik

These are pics of my recent pedal build. It's a Build Your Own Clone Large Beaver, which clones a triangle-era Big Muff pedal. The electronics portion of the build went really smoothly, especially considering that there are at least three different versions you can build from the BYOC instructions. The wiring is probably the cleanest I've done so far, helped immensely by the fact that all of the potentiometer wires are tucked underneath the board.

It sounds really sweet, starting from a basic overdrive to the intense grungy sounds of a big muff when it's turned up. Now it's time to move onto the envelope filter and to finish up the flanger. The biggest thing holding me back is painting.

A few things to making build Guitar pedals easier

Besides offering a bunch of really reasonably priced PCB boards, guitarpcb.com offers a couple of items that will make building pedals easier.

The first is a board that works with 3PDT switches to make it easier to wire. When I first started building pedals, the posts on the 3PDT was the most intimidating part. This board gets rid of the tricky wiring, and should make pedals a little cleaner on the inside.

The second item is the pot condom. These neat little bits fit onto the bottoms of potentiometers to prevent them from shorting out the circuit. I used to use a little strip of electrical tape, but this is a much prettier solution.