Wiring the Cattlegrazer Treble Boost/Fuzz Pedal

Here are the capacitors I'm going to put into the pedal.

The Weber Cattledrive I built has an .001 input cap, which I have found to be a bit too thin sounding for most situations.  At some point, I'll open it back up and change it out.

The stock value for a Rangemaster was .005, so I decided to have two smaller values than that for 'thin' sounds, and then three bigger values so I could hear the tonal difference.  Note: after the pedal was done, I swapped the values so I now have .002, .005, .02, .05, .08. and .15.

By the way, I christened the pedal with a name:  the Cattlegrazer.  The name needed to be bovine-related since the at least two variants have a 'cowboy' theme: Rangemaster, and Cattledrive.

I expect I'll get a fair amount of fuzzy distortion at the higher value capacitor settings, so I think we can safely call this a treble boost/fuzz box.

Here's a shot of the wiring at the beginning.  I used a terminal strip pop-riveted to the box.  It made for easy wiring, but it was actually a bit more cramped than I would have expected.

Closeup of the caps mounted to the rotary switch.  The input from the input jack goes directly to one of the switch poles (yellow wire).  Then each of the caps has one side connected to a terminal, and the other lead on all of the caps are brought together then go to one of the terminal strip lugs.

Here's the Engine Room, as it were.  The original Rangemasters used a Mullard OC44 PNP transistor.  You can still find NOS OC44s out there.  This is the 'military' version of the OC44 - it's a CV7003.  Supposedly it has 'tighter' specs than the OC44, but in this application, I doubt it matters much.

I mounted the transistor in a socket.  These things are very sensitive to temperature and it's easy to ruin one when soldering it.  I figure why take a chance, so I use a socket.  The socket also makes it easy to substitute a different transistor if you want to experiment.

Here's the whole thing wired up.   I have a 3DPT switch for true bypass and an LED, unlike the originals which just had a single switch to bypass the effect or switch it in.

I didn't plan very well for the battery, but I got lucky since it wedges in nicely.  There is also a negative-center-pin jack so I can use a wall wart instead of a battery.