B.o.S. builds a .. Rando winter build part 2..

[BetterOffShred]

Well I built a Noise Swash .. It's pretty rip. Did some glitter shenanigans on the box.

[AZX309]

Glitter shenanigans is the name of my next noise pop band

[frodog]

Whooooooo, looks dope! Mermerizing actually. Mermermeeeeeeer. I would like to make such a thing.

[BetterOffShred]

Thanks guys. Yeah the hand drawn stuff is lots of fun. I'm doing water colors now on some stuff. I can definitely do labeling much better with a fine tip brush and water colors.

[BetterOffShred]

So my experimentation with Germanium transistors has been going rather strong for roughly a year.. but it's all been PNP stuff mostly using cheap Russian units acquired in lots. Now I've begun experimenting with NPN builds and converting some basic stuff to NPN..

I've been using the Geofx transistor tester, with my Fluke meter but it's wired for PNP, and I currently have no means of testing the NPN.. the Geofx method indicates changing the polarity of the power to the board and changing the leads of the meter, and the standard calculations will yield the same results.

I think I'm going to put a 4PDT toggle and maybe a ZIF socket on a 1590A or something so I can swap from PNP to NPN with just a single toggle. Anyone have a home built germanium tester? The other option is just to buy an Atlas..

[crochambeau]

My Mega328 (el cheapo Atlas copy) tests Ge just fine. It doesn't call out Ge or Si, but you can tell by drop it reads.

[BetterOffShred]

I have one. It doesn't factor in leakage so the Ge stuff comes out considerably higher than actual gain values from my tests. It's great for like literally everything else.

[crochambeau]

Ah, I've not been working with Ge stuff so that fact completely escaped my attention. Thanks for the info!

[BetterOffShred]

For sure man. It's really good at letting you know pinout on stuff too.. with exception of some real leaky like Tonebender Mk 2 Q1 status stuff.. if it's too leaky it will actually read it as NPN with like 5hfe.

I also have some Ge diodes it won't recognize so I actually do voltage drop with my Fluke to see Fv..

[Ben79]

I bought an Atlas. Actually I bought 5 cos they were crazy cheap special offer end of line at Maplin and I sold 4 for enough of a profit on Ebay to cover the one I kept. I've got a cheapo Chinese component tester too, screwed onto a bit of wood and rigged up to run off a 9v wall wart. I think it cost about £5 and it reads pretty much exactly the same as the Atlas just without the leakage figure.....? plus it does resistors and caps (with ESR reading), and has a big backlit display. Problem with the Atlas is those clip things are always breaking and needing to be resoldered. I saw always, it happens maybe once a year.

I have quite large quantities of germanium transistors if you ever need a few.

[BetterOffShred]

Sweet man, yeah I'll probably just buy an Atlas. It seems like it's worth having one for continued Germanium projects and whatnot. I've been buying lots of germanium stuff when I can find a good deal. Of course I don't have very many that are over 100 hfe. I just ordered some P416B's which are supposed to be 90-200. We will see. I'd like to try a 120ish in my Mk IV Tonebender Q3..

Thanks for the offer Dude

[BetterOffShred]

Built another Dead Astronaut board finally. I got the Dream Time, it's a really good delay. Long Looong clean repeats. I've been really examining the 2399 circuits I have built and want to build, and I've come to realize that the 15/16 and 13/14 caps are a strange thing. Most of Dead Astronauts designs call for 1nf, and some of the other stuff I really really like (namely Culturejams glorious delays) all use 2.2nf. So I socketed them and tried everything from 800pf up to 3.3nf and I found in the Dream Time I liked the 1.8n the best. I think 2.2n sounds really good too, but with how clean the Dream Time is you can get away with smaller values. The darker repeats are always appealing to my ear though.

[BetterOffShred]

Well my breadboarded delay is coming along pretty nicely. I've got the effects loop working ok but I want to try a few different types of buffers to see.. I am going to try a transistor, jfet and mosfet buffers.. I've got a couple TL072s going now. I'm curious if the jfet and transistors do in fact sound any less sterile. Sterile is ok for delay right?

[frodog]

Looks neat! I want a breadboard like that... got two small ones that I link together when I need a bigger one, but it still amounts to half the size of yours, minus the power strip and edge plate. Not much space for things like a delay.

However I did a bread based on the crap-fi delay recently. It got out of hand with lotsa diodes and an MPSA13 gain stage though. Somewhere in the middle of that process I got some very cool sounds, like one configuration where it seems the diodes gave me control over the spacing between double-tap delays for interesting rhythmic effects. Unfortunately I lost it and ended up with a super dirty thing where the gain and delay was all intertwined in a way I did not understand. But that might be because there wasn't a buffer/blend in there to begin with. So it goes, tear it up and start again.

[BetterOffShred]

Yeah man that shit was like $22 on eBay. Totally worth!!

When I'm breadboarding from a known circuit I always print out the schematic and once I change something I like I write it down on the schematic. This particular delay is based off the rebote 2.5 with more aggressive filtering and feedback loop values closer to culturejams Triton.

I'm playing with Germanium for the effects loop buffer.. it kind of gives it a little heat. Certainly not a "clean" buffer, but it only gets a little hair as you boost past unity.

I've also been messing around with the Noise swash standard and a depth knob on the LFO.. pretty cool. I love my 8 knobber.. 12 will be even more fun