DirtBag Deluxe build

[mysticwhiskey]

I just finished boxing this up tonight.  Thanks to Brian for the great boards and the detailed instructions, it's a challenging build but well worth it.  Sounds absolutely luscious!  After calibrating the trimpots, I found myself playing guitar for about 40 minutes at the test bench (ie the kitchen table).  Lovely pedal.

It's a tight fit in a 1590BB size case, but it's doable.  I used low-profile electrolytic caps on both the main board and the roadrage power board too.  Not much room to spare!  I mounted the roadrage on the lid.  It took me ages to work out how to mounting everything though, and plenty of designing on the computer and measuring carefully to make sure everything fit.  The label is a laser-printed water slide decal using a design I put together.  Not exactly original though!

The other board you can see in the pictures is an IO and power board I made, and also the footswitch mounts onto it as well.  I know it's not the most conventional jack layout but I wanted a 'landscape' type orientation for the pedal.

More pics at http://s247.photobucket.com/albums/gg133/mysticwhiskey/Madbean%20Dirtbag%20Deluxe

[marmaliser]

That is awesome .. I am in awe.   Where is the bow at your feet smilie

[MadeByMike]

Amazing build. Great stuff!

I just started populating my board last night - spent an hour after doing some other builds and only got down the first column of resistors. It's a complex puppy!

[raulduke]

That is a super neat build mate.

Congratulations!

[plesur]

Really nice looking pedal.

What did you do about the 240pf cap in your build?

It took me 10 hours straight to populate my board, just waiting for one pot now to finish it off. I hate the delays from the Christmas post!

[mysticwhiskey]

Thanks for the kind words!  I used a ceramic cap labelled as 220pF that measured 245pF.  I've got another board I've built at the same time as this one, for that I used another 220pF cap that measured 235pF.  I measured a few caps to find ones that were close to 240pF, they seem to vary quite a bit.  The delay pots measured 101K in this build and 98K in the other one.  I also used a 10K linear pot for the feedback in both builds instead of the 10K log specified in the build doc, and it seems to function just fine over the sweep of the pot.  The knobs are Davies 1400 clones from Small Bear, and there's just enough room for them to fit without the knob's pointers interfering with each other.

I don't know how many hours I spent putting these two together, maybe like 15 hours in total.  I went kind of slow over the course of several days.  Most of the time was spent working out how to fit everything in, and designing the decal. It's the first time I've used a fabbed board from madbean and I have to say I'm really impressed with the quality and the ease of soldering.  And it sure beats etching my own board and drilling hundreds of holes!

I've gone kind of delay-crazy over the last few months, and I'm considering building another DirtBag to use the couple of V3205 chips I have just to compare how it sounds to the MN3005 versions.  Based on the sound of the previous V3205 delay I built (the AD3208 from guitar gadgets) I reckon it'll sound pretty close to the 3005 version like Brian says.

[LaceSensor]

Soooo nice congrats.

[jimmybjj]

Incredible!

[pryde]

Wow. Top notch build man.

I can't wait to get mine going but I got about 3 builds in front of it

[jkokura]

I really like the layout on that one. That came out really nicely I think.

Jacob

[cjkbug]

can you publish the art for the switch/jack daughter board. that's a sweet solution

EDIT. nevermind i found it

[eldanko]

Absolutely sick.  Well done!  And you have encouraged me in my quest to fit everything in a 1590BB as well....

[dwstanford]

Absolutely gorgeous.  I'm diggin' the horizontal layout.  I may have to try that with mine.  Where might i find one of those boards you used for the jacks and switch? 

[Haberdasher]

Fantastic build, I love it!  I'm now interested in the horizontal layout as well.

[mysticwhiskey]

Here's the PCB transfer image for the IO board. I used PCB-mount Cliff-style jacks. You could use regular PCB mount jacks that have the thread bit sticking out, but then you won't really be able to remove the board from the enclosure without desoldering the jacks.



The image is quite large, it's 600DPI so print at 100% scaling and it should come out correct. I recommend using IrfanView on Windows to print this out, since the Windows default image viewer doesn't seem to print at the correct size (at least for me, that is).