Big Ass Throbbing Grinder Mk I

A few months ago I came across the schematic for the Doctor Boogey. The Dr. Boogie was designed by a ElectricTabs and first introduced on the DIY Stomp Box Forum. The circuit is an emulation of the Mesa Boogie Dual Recitifer Solo Head amplifier using JFETs instead of tubes. The result is a ultra-high-gain distortion pedal that is quite unique.

I decided that this would be a cool project so I went in search of a pre-etched PCB. No luck, so I asked my friend Ramesh to make a board for me from Bucksear's layout. He did a great job with a PCB kit from Radio Shack and a laser printer. After he delivered the board to me, I promptly destroyed it trying to trim it to size. All his work down the drain--so I etched another one myself. My first attempt at etching wasn't too bad, but I should have shrunk the layout down a bit--it turned out about 15% too large, but was workable.

Assembling the Board

After a few hours trashing and hacking my way through the Mouser site, I had ordered all the parts I needed. Within a few days, the assembled stuffage was ready to go:

I went about soldering away. I knew that I wanted to use transistor sockets because some of the Dr. Boogey build reports talk about the value of swapping out different values of transistors to get the gain just right. Unfortunately, the board had inline PCB pads and I had standard transistor sockets from Smallbear. It took a bit of bending and swearing but I finally got them in, along with the other components.

Enclosure Layout

Damn, that's a big board. None of my Hammond enclosures would fit it along with room for a 9v battery and a DC adaptor plug. I had an old sloped panel aluminum enclosure laying around, so I chose that. I drilled the holes for all the parts, installed them (without any wiring) and started on the front panel mockup. I had already decided that I wasn't really happy about the "Doctor Boogey" moniker, so I came up with my own inappropriate name, the "Big Ass Throbbing Grinder Mk I" and proceeded to play around with various colors and graphics. Here's the prototype box top:

Current Progress

I'm working on the wiring this weekend. Hope to be done in the next week or so, along with my world famous clips :)

Build Your Own

Here is the original schematic from Electrictabs: (Note that I've embedded the links as iFrames. This means the content comes directly from external sites. I do not have copies stored on my server.)

Here's Bucksear's layout and wiring diagram:

http://www.4thlevelmedia.com/DrBoogeyPCB.bmp

http://www.4thlevelmedia.com/DrBoogeyPartsLayout.gif