LET THERE BE LIGHT!

[Heath]

The more I play with my VibraCaster, the more I love it.  At first it was just a neat gimmick to me, but the thing really does sound wonderful.  Warm.  Basic.  Musical.  Simple.  



I've got some pedals where I've really gone through hell with fancy graphics and all, and I've found I really hate doing it.  Tons of work for mediocre results.  So lately I've been using oil paint pens (which have their own particular curse-inducing irritations) and going for a "Home Brew" look.  At this point I've only really achieved "Third-Grade Finger Paint" results, but it's getting better.  

I wanted the tube shield on this pedal to be more than just a metal cylinder obscuring the tube (the main point of interest for building the pedal in the first place!) so I cut some holes of various sizes in an attempt to be aesthetically pleasing, followed by a matching paint job.  I think it looks cool, but then I'm probably mentally retarded.

The tube lights up via a blue led embedded underneath the tube where I pulled out some sort of metal socket from the middle of the ceramic tube socket... which may or may not have been important.  Give me pliers and I will generally fuck something up and then try to figure out why later.  Anyway, it's not meant to fake a tube actually glowing (blue would be an odd choice for that, eh?) but more as a clever (not my clever, MerlinB's clever) on/off indicator.  With the tube shield off it works very nicely.


Thing is, with the tube shield on, it's not very... badass.  So I ordered some teeny tiny make-your-life-miserable find-it-bewteen-your-toes-the-next-day blue SMD LEDs.  I wired six of those little bastards inside the tube shield, making it a very tight fit.  I mounted them with a high-tech proprietary process involving black electrical tape, a hot glue gun, and trace amounts of singed flesh.

I routed a tiny bit of ribbon cable out of a little hole in the back of the shield, soldered it to a modified standard 2.1mm barrel plug, installed a second "dc" jack in the back of the pedal which I wired inside just as I would an indicator LED.  

Using the "DC jack" was not what I wanted to do, but I was stuck for a better alternative without ordering something and putting it off for a few weeks.  It needed to be something firmly attached, so superglueing a wafer type connector was not going to work and a 1/8" audio plug was even bigger, over all,  than the dc jack, and much more trouble to wire up.  It's a crude proto-type, so if, for some strange reason I ever feel compelled to try this again, I'll at least know the method is sound.

One thing I really wanted to take advantage of was the fact that the case is grounded, therefore the tube socket is grounded, therefore the tube shield, when attached, is also grounded.. but I would have had to rethink the way the LEDs are connected to the 3pdt switch (ie. cutting +9v on/off instead of cutting ground.. I might be over thinking that).

Aaaaaand, just so you, too, can experience why I can barely see what I'm typing right now:




Yeah... eat shit, retinas.

[Frank_NH]

Very cool Heath!

I haven't built any of the tube-based pedal circuits yet, but hope to get to that at some point as I have a collection of preamp amp tubes I can use.  And I'm sure at some point I'll get the tube amp building bug again...can a man have too many amps??!

[Heath]

Frank_NH wrote

Very cool Heath!

I haven't built any of the tube-based pedal circuits yet, but hope to get to that at some point as I have a collection of preamp amp tubes I can use.  

The VibraCaster is a sweetheart.  Like I mentioned above, but can't state enough, I only built it for the cool factor of building a pedal using a tube, but just from having it sitting around looking neat I've ended up messing with it more than I ever intended to and I love it more each time I use it.  If I ever stat gigging again I'll need to build several of them as I'd definitely use it live.

My other favorite "tube" build is the Spark Gap.

Since it seems people on that thread want to post useful things but not maintain their image accounts, I've posted the relevant vero/schematic stuff at the end of this post.

Frank_NH wrote

And I'm sure at some point I'll get the tube amp building bug again...can a man have too many amps??!

Dude, I think the VibraCaster would be awesome to build into an amp.

[Luke51411]

Killer lighting! I've wanted to build a vibracaster for a while but I lost interest in low voltage tube projects as the next shiny thing came along and distracted me. My interest is now piqued by the sheer badassness of LIGHT UP TUBEZ!!! Great work.