Sunday 3 February 2013

Maxon OD-01 The Driver

Here's something quite interesting. A switch to toggle between TubeScreamer-like, and a Rat-like mode. Basically this could be the basic tool, think swiss army knife, of overdrives and distortions. I omitted the in/out buffers from the layout, but used the original JFET pinout.




I built the layout, and noticed that with my batch of NE5534s i got lots of squeels in distortion (rat) mode when tone and gain were set high. So i checked it around and noticed that NE5534 do have both, balance and compensation. So i added 3n3 cap for compensation and it worked great - much closer to the demo than with the original one. While i started modding it, i changed tone pot value for 50K linear, as the original 100K's first half was just dull and muddy. Also i think linear taper on the gain pot gives much better feel to it. I must admit that this is very good and versatile circuit. Some of these days i'm going to build two of these and put them in the same box with stomp switches for Dist/ODs as well. Recommended build indeed. So. Here's the modded layout:


7 comments:

  1. Is there a schematic available for this pedal?

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    1. Through google. That's the way i found it...
      http://mrotqch.webcrow.jp/stomp/zoo/MAXON_OD-01.png
      +m

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  2. Hey guys.
    Master of the stupid question here.
    Is the 2skl117 the same as the k117 in this build?

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  3. Any subs for the 2SK117? Can only find one seller on eBay and Tayda is out of stock.

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    1. It's just a unity gain buffer so any JFET should work in there, preferably one with a DGS pin out so you don't have to mess around to place it. Try 2SK170, 2SK30, 2N3819, BF244A or 2SK246 if you can find them. If not just use a 2N5457 or whatever you have or can get hold of easily and just twist over the gate and source.

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    2. Cheers Mark, yeah i ended up finding some cheap ones from a similar seller, just gotta wait the two agonising weeks for it to show up.

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