Build Your Own Clone Message Board

I am thinking of putting a bender and ultimate fuzz in the same box. Is there going to be a polarity problem with the ac adaptor if i use it?

The FF kit is negative ground, the Bender is positive ground. Housing them together is a really bad idea.

Plus, they're very similar circuits, you can mod one to the other quite easily.

K

Can you easily make the fuzz face positive ground?

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Pfft, what kind of loser takes the time to make a signature?

Use PNP transistors, turn the electrolytics around...

K

Thanks man

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Pfft, what kind of loser takes the time to make a signature?

Is that all there is to it? My idea originally was to put the bender and fuzz in one box with no parts in common, they would still be seperate fx but in one box instead of two, if that makes sense. But if it that easy to make the bender neg. ground i might try that.

ooops i read that wrong is that all it takes to make the ff pos. ground?

The original FF was (and still often is in the boutique world) a positive ground circuit. At that time almost all the transistors that were being made were PNP germanium, and NPN transistors were rare and not consistent. (This is why silicon was such a good thing!)

With the BYOC FF kit, Keith has designed the board to use rare old stock NPN germanium transistors - probably to make the kit easier for beginners, and to be able to combine those germaniums with different of types of common NPN silicon transistors. The Tonebender kit uses more common PNP germaniums, and therefore it's positive ground.

The FF and the Tonebender are very simple, but also very tricky circuits. The tricky part lies in testing and picking the transistors, and "tuning" the rest of the circuit to the set of transistors you choose. I think both BYOC kits come with matched transistors. In a way, the transistor sets are what makes the personality of the pedal.

The Tonebender is actually just a variation of the Fuzz Face. The Tonebender has an extra transistor stage at front, but other than that they are completely alike. If you would, you could add a switch to bypass this first transistor stage in the tonebender, and you would have a perfect FF + Bender. If you add switches for the second and third stage (as in the PTPFuzz), you can get the best of both worlds, in a very flexible dual circuit pedal.

If you still want to combine the two PCBs in one, then yes - you'll need to get a good set of matched PNP germanium transistors, you turn the few electrolytics around - and then you flip the battery connections around.

K

I have a bit to add to that, the bender is not identical to a ff plus one tranny, it has a few resistor and cap changes, but it's not that big of a difference. Also a cool thing about matching trannys is you get have high gain matches and low gain matches, I dunno how you'd get each without buying a ton and testing them out. I don't have an ff yet, but If I did I think I would just put switches in to alternate, if I really had everything I wanted I'd have a three way switch (low gain germanium, high gain germanium, and silicon

It's also similar with wah pedals, there's no such thing as a bad inductor, you just gotta tune the rest of the pedal to the one you have, and 500 just seems to work best with the "average" wah

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Pfft, what kind of loser takes the time to make a signature?