RaygunFX Octavia Phuzz [traced]

[mirosol]

Ok kids. It's story time with Uncle Mirosol!

One guy up here in north contacted me and asked if i was interested in buying a pedal off from him. The pedal was RaygunFX Octavia Phuzz and he told me that it had "a slight" popping noise on switch and the LED was dead. The pedal was in the same condition as it was when he received it from the manufacturer a few weeks ago. I figured that i could buy it and see if i could fix it. My guess was, as usual, a missing pulldown from the input and a bad luck case with the LED. So i paid him about 70% what a new one costs and waited. Since the name is what it is, i was sorta hoping to see a classic transformer version of the Octavio. These do come rather cheap by default and someone on the internet had said something about "quality parts" and the seller used that as a selling point. I should have known better.

Got the parcel on friday, but was away for the weekend. So i finally got it on my desk today. First thing was to try it out. Sure enough. Nothing from the LED. Pedal seemed to work, but with supermassive POP coming from the switch. And with massive volume drop. And yes. The sound had nothing to do with transformer version of Octavio. Everything about the unit felt a bit off. The chinese enclosure with the moulding errors is polished, but one can't miss it being the one Tayda has in stock. Everthing else is straight up from Tayda catalog as well. 17mm shaft pots with chinese davies knob clones (about 2mm gap between the box and the knob's bottom) and the metal LED bezel etc. The label is a decal with rough cut corners. As it wasn't working properly, i opened it up. I should have known better.

Tayda jacks. You know. The ones that have too short tip arms for standard phone jacks. Builder had this issue fixed by pushing the arms inwards as far as he saw fit. But that's nothing. Everthing else seemed to be about in order, with switch board separated from a bigger patch with a hacksaw and a few similar methods (including no insulation for the LED leads - which i mistakenly thought to be the reason for the dead LED). But wait. The circuit board... Wrapped in three meters of blue electrician tape and fastened to the enclosure with a piece of two sided soft tape. Had to open it up to see what was wrong. At first sight it was very clear to me that the board is two Hemmo's BazzFusses in series with a pot as a variable resistor at the input. After eyeballing it for a minute, i found out what was wrong. The volume pot was hooked up to the 9V strip on the board. The same lug that connects the volume pot to the ground (or as in some cases, to VREF) on every single effect ever created. So the board output had the supply voltage at all times. Soldered the wire to where it should have been in the first place, the ground strip. And whaddaya know. The pedal fired up as it should have fired in the first place. And it sounds exactly like two Hemmo's BazzFusses in series - or in other words, Hemmo's Buzz Box. With a pot to clean it up a bit if needed. But this could have not affected the LED operation. After a second of more yeyeballin', i noticed that the anode of the indicator LED wasn't connected to anything. There was a spot at the 3PDT switch board for the LED resistor, but those holes were empty. Added a suitable resistor, and now i have the unit as is was supposed to be.

I do not know the person behind RaygunFX and i'm in no way affiliated with him. But the pedal he sold through his webshop to overseas had a few issues. I do not see how he could have tried this unit out before selling it - without noticing dead LED and the fact that there was supply voltage on the output jack.

The transistors are your run of a mill 2N3904s and the diodes seem to be per Hemmo's design, as presented by the home-wrecker.com. The second may be a germanium diode, but it looks a lot like 1N4148 with green stripe.

Snapped a few shot and did a trace, plus a layout. Also thought about posting the layout to our tagboardeffects blog, but i feel like i shouldn't give this guy any time in a spotlight. So if anyone can enjoy a schematic and a layout for double BazzFuss, please do enjoy.

[mirosol]

Didn't check it yesterday, but the stripboard layout on this "original" is 1:1 with Mark's layout for Buzz Box.
http://tagboardeffects.blogspot.fi/2012 ... z-box.html
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[Stevemcfat]

Hi Mirosol,

My names Steve from Raygun FX. Thank you for posting this.

This pedal was sent to the customer as a complete mistake, somehow I had posted them an old faulty pedal that was only meant to testing/prototyping and that isn't up to my usual standards! The customer has already emailed me and I have arrange for a replacement to be made and sent which they are happy with. (I was under the impression they was sending it back to me, not selling it on however!)

I called this the Octavia Phuzz because I originally was asked to make a custom pedal for a UK band, and they asked for it to be called the 'Octavia Phuzz' with a similar kinda of effect to an Octavia but also to be cheaper & fuzzier, when I posted a photo of it became so popular people wanted to purchase it so I decided to make a few more. I didn't intend on it being anywhere near the original, it was purely by chance people liked how it looked I guess.

I usually buy my knobs from Bitches Love my switches, not sure if Lance gets the from China, but I've never shopped at Tayda. I only use UK or American stores, although I guess I cannot guarantee their origin.

Obviously I was pretty embarrassed when the customer said they had a faulty pedal, even more so now the pedal building world knows!

Thanks you for posting and you criticism, I will take it all on board. I'm not a full time builder (yet), I do this as a hobby and it's just kind of grown, so I appreciate all the comments/feedback.

Steve

[mirosol]

No worries. I may have come on slightly more aggressive than what was warranted. That same guy bought your Aurora delay and i asked for gutshots (PT2399 datasheet example circuit, right?). Judging by those, your work isn't nearly as bad as this particular Octavia Phuzz unit lets us believe. After the fixes, this Octavia Phuzz is currently in my collection and there is very little chance it'll ever move anywhere from there.

To err is human. But chances are that negligence errors will end up in here in a heartbeat. You coming in with a comment is probably the best damage control you can do.
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