Cheap DIY Distortion and Compressor and Fuzz kits

[Marcel]

Must. Not. Buy. Everything. They. Have.

TNX

I know your pain.... lol

[Andy40]

I bought the compressor one too, built it and it doesn't work. I thought the circuit was a bit weird. Someday I'll pull it apart and rebuild it.

I bought the Jaycar DIY compressor and it works great. learned a lot more b/c instructions were good. the only problem is that its massive and it runs off 12 volts.

[Marcel]

Postie delivered today...

one reverb pedal complete,
one compressor kit
one distortion kit
one fuzz kit.

[JohnH]

What a great haul! Look forward to seeing them come together

[DrNomis_44]

Those kits look pretty cool, I'll have to go check out the website.

[Marcel]

Had a few hours to kill so spent two of them on the compressor kit.

Instructions are meagre and there is nil circuit diagram, but there is enough info to do the assembly. Whether there is enough info to make it work will be left to another day.

Started with the resistors, then the caps, and then the other bits. The parts were nicely labelled and for the most part there was little confusion as t what went where. The only exception to this was the "PWC" connection which needs to go to two places being the 'ring' on the input jack and to a point on the DC in jack.

One thing that is not explained is the LED & LDR combination that is part of how the gain adjustment part of the circuit works. The two parts face each other with the brightness of the LED affecting the resistance of the LDR and thereby changing the gain of the stage that passes the audio. In my build I have added a short piece of black pipe so that the LDR can only "see" the LED, so therefore flashy stage lights shouldn't do weird things to the audio passing through the pedal.

Powering up and testing to come....

[Marcel]

Built the FuzzFace kit today.... Much disappointment with one very tiny win.

As can be seen by the photos there is not a lot of information with the kit... A parts list. That's it... Okay the parts list tells what the various part values are, but nil other info. Nil circuit schematic, nil wiring diagram. and nil explanatory text or even a welcome & thanks for buying our kit.

There is only a few components so the basic assembly of the board isn't that hard... however working out what should be connected to where was a head ache for me so I truly pity the dilemma of a first time builder.

I got it to work, and the Fuzz does sound nice but the volume level is incredibly low so there are still faults to be found.

And for the moment the compressor is a complete failure. The light comes on and off as expected however there is nil noise under any circumstances. I suspect there is a short to ground in there somewhere... most probably in with the i/p & o/p jacks.

[Andy40]

I've heard that the IC on these compressors are supposed to be fake. I put it down to that rather than my bad skillz

[Marcel]

My gut feeling is there are nil fakes in these kits Andy. I've been checking values of the passive parts before I soldered them in and they all have been very close if not spot on the correct value, so I doubt they would stuff it all by not using at least half decent active parts. Even the quality of the jacks and pots and enclosures seems quite good and reasonable...

Just wish they'd include a circuit diagram....

[Marcel]

So while my bench is in kit building mode (and cos I'm waiting on copper foil and nuts to arrive via Aussie post) I had a go at the 3rd kit being the Distortion kit with the pretty Dragon on the housing.

Again the only accompanying documentation was a list of parts identifying that value bit had whatever name on the board. A missing R1 and two R15's was just annoying as R1 connected to nowhere so was surplus to requirements and the two R15's were the same value. In the end there was a part for every needed vacancy on the board.

A very nice thing about this kit was all the supplied lengths of wire, all trimmed and with soldered tips... very handy, and more of them than was needed. And again the parts seem to be of reasonable quality.

Got it together pretty easily, connected a battery, plugged in my test axe and Vox Pathfinder 10 amp.... and it made noise. Through some sort of Friday the 13th miracle it worked first go... Very happy.... It even sound half decent, but only if I pushed the 'Drive' past 7 or 8... Tone and volume also work as they should.

Inspired with confidence I jumped back to the Fuzz kit. After a short time discovered that the foot switch was faulty so set about replacing that. Now that 'bypass' worked I discovered that in bypass this pedal does nasty things to the clean signal. The switch only changes over the output from pedal to bypass and turns on the LED, the input to the pedal is always connected to the guitar so the nasties are coming out of the input to the fuzz board which is not good. When engaged there is some intermittent bits of fuzz in between lots of pops and crackles. A few minutes with the multimeter confirmed nil shorts and the values of the resistors are still fine, and that the transistors are still okay, so something else must be going on which I'll hunt for on another day..

On another note I gave the Reverb pedal a try out. Not the best sounding reverb but it is pretty good for the AU$50 cost. Hall is a bit much for my liking, however Spring and Room are quite reasonable. More suited to a practice/rehersal environment where you just want some reverb type noise. As a work pedal it is quite limited with only Mix and Time controls but it would definitely and admirably get you out of a pinch if you had a gig and your regular reverb device had decided to pack it in.