Here i present a Germanium Fuzz Pedal I've recently build.
It happens that a friend of mine was about to throw away a late 60's record player. This record player was in his old house, the case of the player get wet and unusable due to a loss in the ceiling. This friend also throw away a steel boxfrom ELESTA AG, the plate reads: Bad Ragaz, which sounds like Bad Boy in a mix of italian and english.
I have disassemble it and take all the components out, to my surprise it contains a bounch of germanium transistors. So i decide to build this pedal.
The pedal design is simple, I just stared from the Vox ToneBlender original schematics, which is a Fuzz i really like, and change some values to match the sounds i like more with the components I have.
I've used two PNP germanium transistor: the SFT337, and the AC142. Then I changed the original ToneBlender fixed collector resistor with a Bias potentiometer, that define the Badness of the sound, because we are talking about a Bad Ragaz.
As a side note I must admin that altough germanium transistor sounds goods, they are slighly more difficult that to drive, as example microphonics noise can happens, and noise more in general it's around the corner.
Find below the schematics.
And the original Vox ToneBender
Notes
- read risk disclaimer
- excuse my bad english