Tag Archives: Music

CAD, Design, Electronics, Guitar

Prototype Boost Built, Testing to Come

Building on my work from a couple weeks ago, I put solder to iron and built up a first prototype of the boost circuit for my buddy’s 8-bit fuzz pedal. Th EagleCAD board layout I made earlier was almost exactly what I needed. However, because I was fumbling my way through the software I didn’t have the correct packages selected for all of the devices.

I tweaked the layout with the actual components I ordered from Digikey a few weeks ago. The biggest curveball was that I ordered some gigantic orange 1000pF caps. I just wasn’t looking that closely at packages when I ordered, but I had plenty of board to work with.

I hooked up some 1/4″ jacks to the I/O terminals and connected a 9V. I tested with my Epiphone Les Paul into a Focusrite Scarlet interface. The signal came through clear and clean, and there was no audible (to me at least) distortion as I rolled through the gain range. 

Test-Setup
Board-Left
Board-Right

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I’ll take the board over to check out the performance characteristics on an oscilloscope soon. Then, I’ll start looking to shrink the footprint of the board as much as possible so I can cram it inside an existing pedal.

CAD, Design, Guitar, Woodworking

Bassman Amp Design – CAD Model

Motivation

The recent find of some good looking 3/4″ plywood was the swift kick I needed to get the ball rolling on a long dormant project. A few years ago I started down the road of building a Fender Bassman clone based on the 5F6 circuit. I was going to do this remotely with a friend. He would handle some electronics analysis for some mods we had in mind, and I would guide the mod selection and build the cabinet. I even went so far as to buy a chassis.

Unfortunately the project never went much further and the chassis sat in the corner of my room for a long time. Then, looking for a CAD project to practice on, I picked it up and got a sheet metal part about 80% done. It was a full box with one of the three faces completed with punched holes.

Getting Started

Knowing I had the chassis model nearly done I started to put together a model of the plywood cabinet. I’ve never had much luck modeling larger assemblies from the ground up and wanted to try something new. I had heard the term “top-down” in relation to CAD models and it seemed like the way to go.

Step one was to do a little research on Fender cabinets similar to what I had in mind. I wanted to skip the 4×10 configuration the Bassman is known for in favor of a much more portable and apartment friendly 1×12 combo. I used a few pictures and drawings of the 4×10 configuration to get an idea for the parts involved, then changed the baffle design and size to fit a single 12″ speaker.

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