Parts Bin Fuzz Factory

[Invertiguy]

 Due to the rising cost of, well, everything, my budget has been a little tight lately and has severely limited my pedal building as of late. However, it has also inspired me to become a bit more resourceful! I had a spare enclosure laying around, so I decided to raid my spare parts inventory to see what I could cobble together. I've always been intrigued by the Fuzz Factory and it's ability to get a wide variety of wild and wacky noises out of a relatively simple circuit, and since I had all the requisite pots, resistors, capacitors, switches, and jacks already on hand and a nice collection of Soviet germanium transistors to choose from, I decided to throw one together!



I've never had much luck with vero before, but I had several large pieces on hand so I decided to go for it anyway rather than spend the money on a board. Luckily it's such a simple circuit that it would be hard even for me to screw it up, so it went together rather uneventfully and unlike other vero builds I've attempted before it actually worked on the first try! Even the off-board wiring proved to be less of a rat's nest than anticipated, although it did take some forethought to get it that way. The layout I used didn't include any power filtering or polarity protection, which probably isn't an issue on its own but turned out to be necessary when used in conjuction with other pedals on a daisy chain, so I patched in a daughter board with a P-channel Mosfet protection scheme ala RG Keen and a filter capacitor to keep things copacetic. After that, it was just a matter of printing off some graphics on a waterslide decal and sealing it on with some epoxy resin and I had myself a Fuzz Factory I could be proud of, and proud of it I am!



Despite being a random collection of leftover parts, this thing RIPS. It's a wild, unruly fuzz that can double as a variable frequency oscillator or a radio receiver at certain settings. It can be a little hard to handle at times but it's also loads of fun to mess around with and try to harness the chaos! Odds are if you've been at this hobby for awhile you also likely have the necessary parts sitting around, so if you're ever looking for a low-cost rainy day project this one is certainly worth a shot!

[jimilee]

Very cool! I remember the first time I built one for a friend. I had never heard it, and thought it sounded terrible. He said it's supposed to sound that way. Now I have one of my own.


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[alanp]

Nice! My FF is a parts-bin-special, too