A quick tube (valve) fuzz box

[jonwhitear]

Well, I've just placed an order with Tayda, so my tube driver build is now officially underway (as opposed to being unofficially underway, as it has been for the last year or so ;-)

[jonwhitear]

It's embarrassing it's taken so long to finally box this up, but I thought I'd share the final product with you all...
I definitely recommend building one of these - it's a lot of fun to play

John, I love your idea of using a U-Bolt to give the tube some protection - I'll be doing the same. Do you recall what size bolts you used? In non-pandemic conditions, I'd take a tube to Bunnings and eyeball them, but that's obviously not possible in Sydney at the moment.

Also, do you have any photos of the internal layout of your pedal by any chance? I'm trying to work out how to fit everything into the enclosure, and I'm currently planning to include the full tone stack, so I'll have three extra pots as well.

[jonwhitear]

Well, this wasn't exactly a _quick_ valve fuzz pedal!



I gave up on trying to get the full tone stack in, as I was rather short of space.



Here's the circuit I ended up with. The charge pump reaches ~68V from a 12V input.

[fender3x]

That is just awesome. Looks great, and I imagine it sounds great.

I was thinking that one way to get a bit more room, since you are already doing some bolting, would be to bolt a small enclosure onto the side of the big one and put the tone stack there?

The U-bolt is a good idea, but if I ever break down and make one, I won't call it a "stomp box"... More of a "carefully tap with your toe box"

[jonwhitear]

That is just awesome. Looks great, and I imagine it sounds great.

I was thinking that one way to get a bit more room, since you are already doing some bolting, would be to bolt a small enclosure onto the side of the big one and put the tone stack there?

The U-bolt is a good idea, but if I ever break down and make one, I won't call it a "stomp box"... More of a "carefully tap with your toe box"

Thanks! It does sound good. I was expecting rather more "fuzz" than I'm getting - I have a Marshall origin 20 combo amp, which isn't very high gain at all, so my single coil guitars struggle to get much breakup even with the gain on full. This pedal fixes that ;-)

I'd probably just use a bigger box if wanting to get the tone controls in there as well. This is a 1590BB - a 1590XX might give enough space. Yes, some care is required when stomping ;-)

[WeirdBits]

Have you tried it with a 12AX7?

[DrNomis_44]

Should do a sound demo so we can hear what it sounds like, I remember doing an experiment with the CD4069 Hex Inverter +HV Generator circuit, I was powering it off a standard 9V DC battery, and by adding extra diodes to the Voltage Multiplier circuit, I was able to get it to generate +90V DC.

The circuit should work with 12AU7/12AT7/12AX7 tubes and their equivalents that all share the same pinouts, you'll get different amounts of gain and distortion out of them.