Miles Ahead Fuzz - a fuzz face platform

[Cortexturizer]

Wow, I am really glad!
I am looking forward to your build man
Keep us posted, gimme a chance to nerd around it
One thing that I could have done but did not, is to pour some epoxy resin or glue and prevent those sockets from any movement at all. It's ok the way it is, but hey, I could have done that, that would have made it even better and safer to experiment all day long.
Say guys, is there a topic somewhere around here where we show off our pedalboards or maybe even our bands music?

[culturejam]

That's one of the coolest things I've ever seen. 

[slimtriggers]

Wow!  That is cool!  Everyone should have one of these!

[pryde]

Just stumbled onto this thread, 

As a fellow FF fanatic, I agree this is brilliant work. Thank you!

[jtn191]

this is sweet!

Got me thinking...is there some formula that could calculate temperature based on the voltage inside a fuzz face? Because you could make a digital thermometer fuzz face!

[jeffaroo]

or better yet build a bigger fuzz and control the temp of the box !   

[MattOcaster]

Great build!
Also got a Fuzz with a built in Voltmeter on the bench!
I like the name as well!

[nzCdog]

Looks fantastic... great addition to the pedal board!

[Cortexturizer]

Haha guys, that's great hah.
Anyway the thing you CAN measure while your playing are the Q2's collector voltage changes. It's interesting to look at those while you play, and it gave me a lot of data, some of which may not be relevant at all but still, I see it as nice empirical data that can serve as a guideline for me in the future FF builds.
I was monitoring the changes in Q2's collector voltage [via Miles Ahead Fuzz's voltmeter obviously] while playing with a Strat and with my beloved SG.
If the bias was at the magical 4.5V with an SG I could easily see it go down even as far as 2.3V if I was hitting the strings really hard and playing power chords on the first couple of frets of the guitar. 12th fret and lower - not so much going on with the voltage. Then I made the bias 6.9V [the way Bonamassa likes it] and started playing - the majority of the notes I was playing up to the 12th fret were lowering the bias to around that magical number of 4.5v. So it's no wonder that Joe and those other Gibson humbucking cats love their FF's biased much higher, because the effective bias while you are playing was actually somewhere around the magical number of 4.5V that we are all taught we should achieve in our builds.
With a Strat - I biased it like Eric Johnson likes his, let's say 3.8V or even lower. When you play up the neck, 12th fret or higher, the bias actually started to rise and was achieving close to 4.3-4.5V while of course notes that were much lower on the neck [a couple of first frets of the guitar] sounded really buzzy [not a bad sound, just different, but corresponding to the now even lower bias induced by hitting the lower notes that produce a stronger signal] but Eric almost never uses the FF this way, he plays his liquid solos up the neck.

So there's an observation or two for you all friends, I found this really interesting. Of course, who knows what really is happening within the voltmeter, I mean, it could all be just a huge misunderstanding, but it just makes sense - at least to me! Why else would those humbucking players like their FF's biased so high, and the strat players biased on 4.5v or lower? Maybe I am introducing some sort of paranoid metric called "effective bias"...I don't know, but one thing I do know, fuzz pedals will make you crazy.