A fairly lengthy read ahead… hope it’s worth the time.

I built a Sunn-T awhile back and rather optimistically ordered a 6-pot pre-drilled 1590B enclosure for housing it. Needless to say, the enclosure couldn’t accommodate the Sunn. So I housed it in a 1590BB (below, left hand side) and then had the original enclosure available to use for something else.

The question was what circuit(s) to house in the 1590B. Since I’m just ‘getting my feet wet’ with combo builds, I thought of trying my hand at a fresh combo attempt, involving a ColorSound Overdrive (4 pots) in tandem with an MXR, err EmExAr, as immediately below.

I noticed that the Em fitted perfectly into the lower two spaces using onboard pots. An encouraging start, it seemed.

Great and sounding promising, but unfortunately the box refused to close. Back to the drawing board. Then I recalled that I’d built a Photon Phuzz on veroboard as an experiment awhile back. The CTO by itself could then take up the top half of the box and the Photon (with NOS Russian Germanium, as below) could be accommodated below the footswitch. I tested it offboard first to hear what it sounded like and to check the wiring and functionality.

I followed the Em’s build guide, which has a number of useful wiring options for serial and parallel switching. I though it would be great to have the two boards usable either individually or in tandem, but discovered that there was minimal space left for the two DPDT switches I’d need for this. So I had to abandon this idea as over-ambitious.

I realised there was just enough space to accommodate a bypass LED indicator, but that for better or worse there wasn’t enough room to include the two DPDTs. So the Photon would provide the Germanium front end (warm and fuzzy stuff) to the ColorSound whose bass and treble controls could do some nice tone shaping of the overall result.

I installed the off-board parts (jacks, footswitch, and so on) into the enclosure, cable-tied the pot wires from the CSO (for manageability and neatness), sealed off the joined up wires with heat shrink, and painstakingly tested each successive step. Using one of Barry’s 3PDT board adapters made the whole process much easier, since I had to accommodate a couple of +9V wires and three earths (including two from the verobaord Photon). Finally, I massaged the LED into plece from underneath, soldered it into place, tested that it worked with circuit engaged. This part was slightly hit and miss because I had yet to commit to soldering the adapter on to the footswitch.

The circuit at first failed to sound when engaged, although the LED was working according to plan. I suspected that the footswitch wasn’t making proper contact with the 3PDT board, so soldered it in place as a final test step. Joy of joys, it worked as it originally had during off board testing. Long story short, I present ‘The Pinkerton,’ the most ambitious combo build I’ve undertaken, from which I learnt an enormous amount, largely through a slow process of trial and error but also encouraged by the combo successes of the master builders here. Because it’s all about the master Pink Jimi Photon and has echoes of a famous British rock band, it had to have a bright pink LED and something in the name to remind us of its provenance ‘in the land of grey and pink.’

The original objective was to find a use for the 6-pot pre-drilled enclosure. The final product provides a range of tones and cleans up beautifully with the guitar volume control, so that you can go from mild crunch at low gain settings to moderate distortion using only the guitar volume. Another interesting outcome of the combo idea is that the two gain controls are highly interactive crunch-wise, and, as the cliché has it, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Thanks for reading. I thank Barry and the participants in this inspiring forum (especially Cybercow and wilkie1), whose combo builds, modding ideas, and great support and patient advice to us apprentice builders fuelled this undertaking.

FWIW, my next plan is to finalise the Animal/Supersonic combo build, but in a more forgiving 1590BB, I think.