Well hi, your friendly neighbourhood thread resurrector here.
Thanks DVM for pointing out that you’d already posted about the BSIAB. It’s fun to see just how different the same kit can turn out from a visual point of view huh.
I read with interest your review of the kit components and I generally agree but wanted to offer a couple of points from my own experience. (I’ve made 7 GGG kits so far).
1. PCB’s have been good as you say, but they can be a bit cramped sometimes. The PT80 delay for example. It makes NO electrical difference, but some of the large 0.1 caps have to sit on a bit of an angle.
2. Plate through PCB’s (all my kits have had these) are awesome if you build it right the first time. They are a B*tch if you want to swap parts in and out. The BMP for example. To go from “triangle” to “GGG Tuned” requires at least a dozen resistor/cap swaps and it takes some fiddling to get the old bits out clean (and I’m coming at this as a guy who spent the better part of ten years with a soldering iron in my hands). A minor complaint though.
3. Sometimes the pre-drilled holes are great, sometimes not. I’ve got a couple of pedals with offset input/output jacks. Again not a big deal cause it beat the heck out of drilling it all myself.
4. The LED holders are crap. I buy nice chrome ones from the local electronics store that have LED’s in them already. If you plan to do this too, be prepared to add a resistor in series to drop the brightness if you go blue or white though. I dropped a blue LED in my trem and the sucker was like a spotlight. Same deal with the white LED in my BSIAB. I can see one (a resistor) in DVM’s pix too so I’m assuming he had the same issue.
5. One thing the supplied knobs do pretty well is sit almost flush with the surface as the insides are recessed to accommodate the nut. I went all fancy and bought a variety of knobs to try from different places and none of them fit as well as the ones supplied in the kit. The red chicken heads on my BMP look cool, but I needed to sculpt them a bit with a file and fine sandpaper so they didn’t interfere with each other. Then there are the silver aluminium knobs you can see on my trem and the BSIAB. I love how they look and feel, but if you look close you can see that you have to raise them right above the nut so they don’t rub. It’s a minor aesthetic thing, but hey.
Overall though I don’t want to give the impression that the GGG kits are bad. I think they are great. Just a couple of very minor points I wanted to clarify. Especially when it comes to value, as has been mentioned. I’ve seen Ibanez AD80’s on eBay for $500. My PT80 sounds the same if not better and cost less than $100 and it looks totally unique. I could say the same thing about the Fuzz Face too. I don’t have a load of experience with tremolo pedals, but the EA Improved Tremelo kit sounds simply wonderful to my ears. Use it in your FX loop and you can play “Bang Bang” by Nancy Sinatra all night long
O one final thing before I go back to work.
Love the names of the controls on that BSIAB DVM!!! I wish I’d thought harder before I did mine as “Rock” “Tone” “Roll” haha
