Myton Blondes

[timbo_93631]

     These are Myton Blonde ovedrives for an eBay customer that bought my last Electric Warrior Rangemaster Clone.  First time working from GuitarPCB boards, quite a bit trickier than working on MB's fabbed boards.  The traces are super tiny and it is easy to come up on a solder bridge as the ground plane goes around everything and there is maybe a 1mm gap between traces and ground plane.    The white one in the 1590b was built by someone else and the customer was not happy with the build quality and tone.  The other builder did a fairly tidy job, not a mess by any means.  The caps were box type and economy electrolytics, and the pots and trimpots were cheapish too.  The wiring was slightly spaghetti 24 or 26awg.  Swapped caps for Nichicon Finegold electros and some NOS ElMenco's.  I replaced the pots with some Alphas and installed a metal LED bezel and sanded ultrabrite waterclear blue LED.  Also replaced the Neutriks with Switchcraft jacks and popped in a new 3PDT.  Then I rewired it using some "topcoat" 22awg.  It was weird changing someone else's work.  It felt alot different than modding a factory pedal.  Whoever built this did their best, and I almost feel bad for messing with their work, but it was what the customer wanted. 
     The Sparkle Black pedal is a little different.  I built it from scratch and had to use a 125b because the customer wanted me to use some pretty huge PIO caps.  All the other parts are the same as in the white pedal with the exception of the electrolytics which are some audio quality Sanyo's with gold leads.  They were a little shorter and fatter so I had more clearance for the PIO's.
    In the end the pedals sound similar, but both have their own flavor.  The white pedal is a little smoother and Fenderish, almost like a cranked champ.  The black one is a little richer and grainer sounding, like it has more harmonic overtones almost like a Vox AC15 with less treble.  Nice pedals.  Sorry to Madbean for ne non-bean content.

[nzCdog]

NOS El Mencos and PIOs... yum
Pimp my clone!

[timbo_93631]

Yeah, mojo caps a plenty!  As if it weren't already a squeeze for the El Menco's!    I am glad the customer wanted the 2 builds, it was amazing the differences between the two.  But I am sure there are others who still stick by the "caps dont matter" viewpoint.  If you are going to build one of these, or a boomstick or other FET based pedal, it is a good idea to filter the DC with a 47uF or larger cap on the power jack.  Makes it much quiter at idle!

[TNblueshawk]

Looks great Timbo. It does take a bit to learn how to solder on Barry's boards. I got the hand of it though. I didn't notice the ground plane running around the board and I populated two boards at once before I realized it....after they didn't work  Had to break out the braid big time 

[timbo_93631]

Yeah, the white one that I fixed up had all the grounds going to the input jack instead of using the ground plane on the PCB when I got it.   It looks a lot cleaner with minimal ground wires by utilizing the ground plane.  It was suprising to me how much quieter these were at idle after filtering the DC with a 47uF capacitor.