duhvoodooman
Addicted to solder....
Adrian30 recently posted HERE about his BYOC kit version of this vintage Boss pedal, about the same time that I was ordering parts for the same pedal. However, I opted to go the "a la carte" route by ordering an SG-1 clone PCB from General Guitar Gadgets (GGG) and buying all the parts directly from my favorite pedal parts and electronics suppliers.
As you may have noticed from Adrian's photos, this is a fairly extensive pedal build compared to many, with a boatload of resistors, capacitors and transistors to be mounted on the PCB. Additionally, by going the less expensive route (my total parts cost came to under $50 vs. $75 for the BYOC kit), I gave up one nice advantage the kit would have provided: the high quality BYOC circuit board. Though GGG offers some very nice boards with silkscreened labeling and double-sided, through-eyelet designs, this was a much more rudimentary board. The circuitry and solder pads were a simple single-sided etching and were unlabeled, so I had to populate the board very carefully, referring to a layout diagram for each component.
There was one other snafu--the GGG page led me to believe that the PCB would fit a standard Hammond 125B enclosure, and it most certainly did NOT. So I had to buy a bigger 1590NS enclosure, and will just use the 125B on some other future build. But completing the build after these adventures, the effect worked perfectly on the first try. There's a trimpot to adjust to give the maximum swell effect, but it was set nearly perfectly (at its midpoint) to start.
I decided to name the pedal "Gee That's SWELL", and some photos and a link to a brief clip demonstrating the swell effect are attached. It's an exercise in purple; even the LED is violet colored.
Sample Clip
As you may have noticed from Adrian's photos, this is a fairly extensive pedal build compared to many, with a boatload of resistors, capacitors and transistors to be mounted on the PCB. Additionally, by going the less expensive route (my total parts cost came to under $50 vs. $75 for the BYOC kit), I gave up one nice advantage the kit would have provided: the high quality BYOC circuit board. Though GGG offers some very nice boards with silkscreened labeling and double-sided, through-eyelet designs, this was a much more rudimentary board. The circuitry and solder pads were a simple single-sided etching and were unlabeled, so I had to populate the board very carefully, referring to a layout diagram for each component.
There was one other snafu--the GGG page led me to believe that the PCB would fit a standard Hammond 125B enclosure, and it most certainly did NOT. So I had to buy a bigger 1590NS enclosure, and will just use the 125B on some other future build. But completing the build after these adventures, the effect worked perfectly on the first try. There's a trimpot to adjust to give the maximum swell effect, but it was set nearly perfectly (at its midpoint) to start.
I decided to name the pedal "Gee That's SWELL", and some photos and a link to a brief clip demonstrating the swell effect are attached. It's an exercise in purple; even the LED is violet colored.
Sample Clip
oke: 
