Cheap DIY Distortion and Compressor and Fuzz kits

[Marcel]

Was browsing around on Ebay and found a Chinese seller who amongst other things sells a number of different guitar pedal kits for just under US$20 each. So I bought a few, namely a distortion kit because it has a cool picture of a Dragon on it, a compressor kit as there are times I just want a compressor of any sort on my guitar, and a two transistor Fuzz kit just for the fun of having an old school Fuzz box between my axe and my amp.

They also had a basic 3 mode reverb pedal for US$40 which I also thought 'why not'. The 3 modes are 'hall', 'spring' and 'room' and the 2 controls are 'mix' and 'time', so yep! very basic...

Hopefully they will all turn up sometime mid October. It will be interesting to see how well/good my AU$125 spend turns out...

[DrNomis_44]

Was browsing around on Ebay and found a Chinese seller who amongst other things sells a number of different guitar pedal kits for just under US$20 each. So I bought a few, namely a distortion kit because it has a cool picture of a Dragon on it, a compressor kit as there are times I just want a compressor of any sort on my guitar, and a two transistor Fuzz kit just for the fun of having an old school Fuzz box between my axe and my amp.

They also had a basic 3 mode reverb pedal for US$40 which I also thought 'why not'. The 3 modes are 'hall', 'spring' and 'room' and the 2 controls are 'mix' and 'time', so yep! very basic...

Hopefully they will all turn up sometime mid October. It will be interesting to see how well/good my AU$125 spend turns out...

Cool, you should definitely start a build thread for each of them, I'll be interested in seeing how they turn out.

[Marcel]

Nice thought Doc, but historically the way I end up building little kits like these the threads would end up being more work than the kits themselves. I think I'll just keep them all here on one thread but still as separate items or aspects of one build...

[Joe3334]

Any chance you could post the name of the seller? I'd be interested in building some pedals.

[Dedman]

will be watching with interest

[Joe3334]

I found the seller on eBay and decided to buy one. It was only $25 for a distortion pedal kit which obviously came with the components however they could not supply me with an actual diagram, they did however send me 4 images that are supposedly going to tell me exactly what goes where. Feel free to judge on whether or not these images are good enough to easily follow.

[Simon Barden]

I'd say no, not clearly. The last photo is the only one showing the orange and black wires to the holes above the ones marked 'input', and they then run under the board without showing with any certainty what they connect to. Whilst you can probably assume that RV 1, 2 and 3 run across the box in order, there's nothing to definitively state this, though it should be easy enough to test once built and correct if necessary (if you haven't cut the wires too short).

[Simon Barden]

Also if RV1, 2 and 3 have different values, then which goes where?

[Marcel]

The kit you pictured Joe3334 appears to be very similar to the distortion pedal kit that I ordered for the same price you paid. Uses a TLA072 chip or similar for distortion gain and a offset biased transistor to create the distortion effect. When I finally get it built I'll be interested to see how it compares to my TS-9. Same for the reverb pedal how it stacks up against the digital reverb in a JVM210c or my Lexicon MX200.

The Ebay seller I used is linked below for anyone who wants to chance a look. They have an interesting array of kits and stuff on offer.

https://www.ebay.com.au/sch/landtone...1&_ipg=&_from=

[Joe3334]

I ordered from landtone1008 too, Marcel. Other DIY pedal kits that they stock do have actual paper instructions that come with the kit, from what I can see based on the eBay listing my kit doesn't come with paper instructions. I did request instructions and they sent me those 4 images. I'm a complete newbie to all of this DIY pedal stuff let alone DIY guitars so I'll see how my attempt at this goes, and the kit was $25 anyway so if everything goes downhill I haven't lost a fortune in doing so.

I would recommend checking out landtone1008's Aliexpress page, they sell a plethora of pedal related stuff compared to their eBay page such as even more diy pedal kits, individual shells for pedals, components etc.