Benzin VH4- Get your chug on!

[Invertiguy]

Since I can't really fire up my half stack at home without pissing off the neighbors (I live in a duplex with thin walls), I've been on the hunt for a good high-gain distortion project for awhile for use with my practice rig. After seeing and being rather impressed by demos of the Diezel VH4 pedal, which is an emulation of the amp of the same name, I stumbled across PCBGuitarMania's clone board and decided to give it a shot. And so, here it is!



Given the large number of knobs, I decided to go for a fairly simple approach for the graphics. The design was printed with my trusty el cheapo inkjet onto waterslide paper and applied to a 1590BBM spray painted with white enamel, then sealed in with Envirotex. Surprisingly I ended up with very few bubbles this time, although there may be a cat hair or 2 stuck on the sides. The paint seems to have yellowed slightly under the Envirotex, as there's a very slight shift in color around the edges of the waterslide decal. In any case, it's hardly noticeable, so I'm not too worried about it, although it is definitely a reason to stick with powder-coated enclosures in the future.



Here's the guts. Assembly went fairly painlessly and there's very little noise to speak of, so it appears that the RG-174 coax is doing it's job adequately. Overall, I'm fairly happy with this build. It certainly cranks out molten metal tones in droves without upsetting the neighbors too much. Is it as good as a cranked up 100W all-tube half stack moving serious air? Maybe not, but few things are, and it's certainly sufficient for my uses. I'd highly recommend this build to anyone looking for tight, saturated high-gain tones in a small package and a reasonable volume, and I'd say it definitely lives up to it's namesake.

[DLW]

Very clean build. I like the design, as well... what is the function of the 3rd jack?

[JackSkellington]

I't a feature of the original pedal. It's a the output that you can connect the pedal directly in the return of the amp.
It's a project I wanna try, but I use build pedal with the stripboard. There's the tagboard layout, but someone got some issue. This distortion is prone to the oscillating.

[Hexjibber]

Been thinking about building one of these for a while now, I had an idea to do an Adam Jones of Tool style rig but with pedals and a blend of some sort, may use this as the Diezel component!

Nice build, clean and tidy, dig it!


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