Cheap DIY Distortion and Compressor and Fuzz kits

[DrNomis_44]

I've got box's and box's of all sorts of caps Doc, I was just too lazy to get off my arse and get one, it was simpler to plug in another pedal that was already sitting on my bench.... but I know what you mean, and it's probably a good thing to do any way to every pedal build to keep the 9VDC playing nice under any circumstance.

Those SBT's could be the go. Not many Germanium transistors available any more. All the major suppliers don't seem to stock them either. Let us know if you do find them. I know how easy it it to loose things, I've only had my big shed for 8 years and I'm always finding stuff that I thought I had lost or loosing stuff that I had in my hand only yesterday....

Even though the 2N2907's are silicon they still do a pretty decent job at creating fuzz. For the reasons given in the article you linked Doc their hfe is in the right range and their other characteristics like Max V and frequency response are reasonably similar or better to the published AC128 values. I didn't measure their hfe and I only had two of them so it was always going to be pot luck at getting a positive result. At uA currents the hfe is 75 but at mA currents the hfe increases to 100 so it is definitely in the ball park on that front. On some fronts I'm suspecting the whole Germanium thing might be a bit of a mental phurphy played out by some guitarists as these 2N2907's are doing a commendable job. Knowing now the FF theory from the article I can see how the BC108 NPN crowd grew their legs, so to speak...

Fortunately I happen to know exactly where I put all those SBT's, so it'll be fairly easy for me to find them, I'll post a pic once I get them back to my new flat, I thought I might have a pic on one of my PC's slave HDDs but so far haven't found it, I've got a semiconductor analyser that I can use to pick out some good ones.


I've also got a small plastic bag of some BC108C transistors at my old flat too.