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This is another blast from my 80’s past. Back then, I bought a Kramer ZX20 electric guitar as a teenager and decided I needed some cool distortion effects. Why save up and buy a pedal, when you can make one instead?

This project is truly ancient, pulled out of the basement. No stellar construction techniques, but a bit of a time capsule, and fun to see how I made it.

The basic idea is just a guitar distortion box. It also has a pass-through switch to bypass the distortion effect and just play “clean”. I have no idea where my notes are regarding the schematic, but it looks like nothing more than an old school 741 op-amp gained up and clipped with some diodes for a crunchy sound. This was a few years before I had any formal electronics coursework and I remember faintly hearing AM radio stations in the background when I wasn’t playing. Free bonus feature!

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Another cheesy build of mine using the few tools I had back then and 100% Radio Shack parts – plenty of 30AWG wire wrap wire, and some very dried out masking tape. Fun to see the insides after all these years.

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My older son now plays my Kramer ZX20 and once he saw this fuzz box, he fired it up. It still worked, though we did break some of the 30 AWG wire wrap wires later when we removed the lid. He’s moved on to some PC app that does a million more effects anyhow, but apparently doesn’t have built in AM radio demodulation.