Aion pedals

[xtian]

I'm building a Pete Cornish G-2 clone. It's all working, except for the Germanium diodes. See schematic clip. I'm using sockets for D2-5, the four Ge diodes:

cygnus.jpg

If I pull out the four diodes, the pedal works fine, though obviously I'm not getting the diode clipping. If I install D2 and D4, there is no change to the waveform, and signal still passes. However, if I install either D3 or D5 (the reverse biased ones, marked in red on the schematic) the signal gets clamped to near zero. Why?

My Ge diodes all read between 0.34 and 0.4v drop. I've tried all of them in the D3 socket, but they all clap the signal to zero.

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

[xtian]

I'm not making any progress on this. I removed components to simplify, and I'm still reading 100K resistance between the points marked:

cygnus2.jpg

[dorrisant]

I don't see the connection. I'm stumped.

Madbean Darkside (G2) has the diodes on the other side of the caps, C13 and C16, but I don't see how that makes muac difference.

No solder whisker, etc.?

1st thing I though was that maybe the diodes, 3 &5, might be shorted...

[Winder]

Seems similar to the Big Muff Pi. I'm not familiar with the G-2. Are you showing the whole circuit? Seems like it's designed to clip at the breakdown voltage of the Ge diodes. The Pi boosts the signal again after clipping.

https://www.electrosmash.com/big-muff-pi-analysis

[xtian]

Sorry, forgot to post: replacing the Ge diodes with standard 1N4007s made the pedal work fine. Not sure what the issue with my Ge diodes is--they measure ok out of circuit.

[xtian]

I finished building three Aion pedals:

Aion Cygnus - Pete Cornish G-2. The Germanium diodes I bought from tubesandmore.com didn't work. Instead I used silicon diodes, and the pedal works fine. The distortion isn't magical...maybe I need to find some other Ge diodes.

Aion Malacandra - Xotic AC/RC Booster - I built this one as an RC Booster, and it's very good. Nice tone controls. Easy to get that angry single-coil bite like SRV.

Aion Procyon - BJFe Honey Bee Overdrive - A very nice sounding, mellow overdrive. Not a lot of distortion on tap (overdrive!) but plenty of gain for driving tube amps. I imagine this is a nice "always on" pedal.

I ordered all parts from tubesandmore.com and mouser.com, and cost was about $50 each.

aion-pedals.jpg

[MakerDP]

I've built three Aion pedals... the Lumin (BBE Sonic Stomp), Prism (BOSS FA-1 FET Amp) and the Azimuth kit (Zendrive).

Great products all of them. The Azimuth is a permanent part of my sound and the FA-1 is my booster. I sporadically use the Lumin.