Auto Tron

Hello All,
     Sorry for the length in between posts, I've been super busy plus my kids Daycare has been closed for the past 2 weeks (vacation). So, I haven't had a whole lot of time. But I was able to finish this one up for a customer. It is a clone of the Mutron III. There are a couple of mods done to the circuit to make it a bit more "buildable". The Original pedal worked off of 24 volts and used the VTL5c3/2. The VTL is a vactrol with 3 legs on the resistor side (one is common). These have been discontinued and are expensive. This uses 2 of the more standard vactrols. This also has a charge pump built into the circuit so the power is now a standard 9 volt power supply. The last mod is a volume mod. The original does not have a volume control. This does.

     I did the art layout and paint on this enclosure. It isn't actually paint, It's alcohol ink. This was fun to work with. I put a bunch of drops of different colors on the pedal and blended them with a Q-tip. then before it dried, I lit it on fire. Yup thats right, the alcohol caught and created a smother blend. Then I clear coated the enclosure to create and even surface for the decal and applied it. Then clear coated again and drilled and assembled. Here are a few pictures of the finished product.

Thanks for reading!

-Mike-

Wave Machine #2

Hello All,
      This is the second Wave Machine I have built. Here is the first. The guts on these are the same. The only difference between the two is I used heat shrink tubing on the LED / LDR s that control the Tremolo / Chorus / Vibrato effect. I thought that there wouldn't be a huge difference but there is. There seems to be less bleed of the effect and it seems to be overall prominent. I'll have to open up the other unit and do the same to it, Since it is the same electronically I'll just post some pictures for your eyeball's pleasure!!

Here is what I did with the enclosure. First I acid etched the enclosure with ferric chloride. Second, I painted it with flat black primer. Last, I sanded the areas where i had acid etched the lettering and graphics. This took a while, primer is A LOT thicker than I thought. My goal was to make it look like waves in the ocean had warn down the paint to reveal the lettering. Eh...kind of a failure but it still looks cool.

Thanks for looking guys. I'll try to get a video up soon!

-Mike-

Wave Machine

Hello again!
     I finished one of the many projects sitting on my bench. This is a clone of the Roger Mayer Voodoo Vibe. This was used most commonly by Led Zeppelin and Jimmy Hendrix. This thing is a BEAST. Tons of options and controls. I'll go through them briefly.

Speed:
This controls the speed of the modulation. There is an internal trim pot that can adjust the max speed and there is also an option to have an external expression pedal jack wired up. I opted to not have this.

Range:
This is a 6 position rotary switch. It goes from "classic" to "pulse". There are 3 positions for each mode. They resemble Soft, Medium, and Hard. They also increase with the turn of the switch.

Effect:
This simply changes from Chorus, Vibrato, and Tremolo

Symmetry:
This changes the sweep of the modulation across the sign waves.

Intensity:
I feel this is a little self explanatory...it sets the intensity of the effect.

Vol:
This sets the output volume of the effect.

Bias:
This alters the center of the sweep frequency and in tremolo mode sets the depth of the sign wave. It almost acts like a blend knob.

Mod:
This is a voicing mod. It is a 3 position rotary switch that changes capacitor sets within the effect. This give you the option to have a multitude of tones for each effect.


The PCB was designed by Brenja on the Madbeans forum. He also designed the Mod board. I acid etched and painted the Enclosure and did the artwork too. This pedal is a modulation monster and I plan on holding onto one of the 2 I have built. This was tons of fun and despite its size it was fairly easy. It fired right up and worked the first time.

Any ways here are some pictures. I'll try and get a video up soon. Thanks for reading!