EP Booster soldering

First post of SUMMER VACATION!!!!!
I've been waiting for these glorious 2 months for a long time now. And now they are finally here! Let's just jump right into it.

I've already made a lot of posts about soldering the components on the vero board. If you want a full in depth description check out some of my earlier post of my first pedal.

So here it is, the EP Booster! The EP Booster is based on the preamp circuit of the old EchoPlex tape machine. A lot of Legends: Jimmy Page, Eddie Van Hallen, Eric Johnson; use the echoplex as a preamp. So Xotic effects based this booster pedal on this preamp. It also gives a volume boost

Some things you might notice is that all of the electrolytic caps are all bend down. This needs to be done if you want you fit it in a smaller enclosure

I say this with every build but my soldering skills have increased so much. Everything is a little cleaner, neater, and more reliable.

This cap was especially bent. The problem with this is that I have to make sure that nothing is touching the leads.

The enclosures thickness is pretty thin so the caps being bent the way they are gives so much more room for the pot and offboard wiring

In therms of the width of the board, it has a fair amount of room for the other wires. For the offboard wiring, I'm going to try and make it as neat and clean looking as possible!

For the knob i'll be using a chicken head knob! For 1 it looks cool, and the original EchoPlex had these kind of knobs, so I thought I would keep it to period. As for the switch, it's an DPDT on/off/on. This will switch between a bright / warm feel

School is almost out!

Next week is my final week of school! That means I have WAY more time to build PEDALS! Because I've been occupied by exams and such, I haven't really had time to enjoy my amazing hobby. And I know that I have been lacking on the blog posts. But I assure you that during the summer there will be a lot more building, experimenting, and way more posting on this blog.

Something really cool has happened over the passed couple of days, one of my friends at school asked me build him a pedal. I was really shocked at this proposal because this hobby of mine has now turned into a little business. I let him try out the Red Llama I build a while ago and he seemed to like it. But since he want's something a little original, which is great (it lets me be creative), I decided to add a very simple yet effective mod. Basically, I just need to replace a resistor with wires coming from a switch that switches between two resistors. This increases the gain of the pedal. This mod is simply adding a lead/rhythm switch to control two levels of gain. This switch is actually on the original Craig Anderson Tube Sound Fuzz circuit (which the Red Llama is based on).  I'll be ordering the parts for the second Red Llama very soon and will post some pics of the build. If you want read a post I wrote on how the Red Llama works, click here.

No matter what, this summer is going to be extremely fun! Be sure to check out this blog frequently for new posts and great pictures. Hope you all have a great end of school year!