Hi! I've recently built a Love Squeeze compressor (
https://tagboardeffects.blogspot.com.es/2012/02/rothwell-love-squeeze.html).
Used
BAT43 instead of 1N5817 for D2 and D3. This diodes are of great importance for the amount of compression of this circuit. With
BAT43 diodes you get a pretty obvious compression with the compression knob fully counter clock-wise, and if I'm not wrong that shouldn't happen with this pedal. My tester reads 0.220 Vf on the
BAT43. I've used this diodes because they have the same specs as the BAR43S, which are the ones that you apparently find in the original unit. However, if you look in the following picture you will see that in the bottom left corner there are two standard schottkies diodes (BAR43S are surface mount device):
Maybe they have used differents diodes along time...
In a couple days I'm going to try some other diodes between 0.2 and 0.6 volts of forward voltage. The higher the Vf the subtle the compression becomes. I'm looking for almost none or none compression at all with the compression knob all the way down.
The pedal is working great BTW, very transparent and dead quiet. Maybe the high end is not as lively as I would like...but let see that later.
A couple pics of the board (there's one greenie with wrong value, 3.3nf instead of 33nf, already solved it):
I just wanted to comment this as I thought it could be of interest of any other builder. Any comment is welcome! :)