While cleaning my workbench and some of my cabinets today, I came across this piece of an old Geloso tape machine from the 1960s which I had bought at a flea market last year. Sadly the tape machine wasn’t in working condition, but I managed to get plenty of parts off of it, and saw that it was dated 1968 on the inside.
I honestly can’t remember what the function of this piece was, but I thought it looked cool and always intended to somehow build something with it.
Well, today I finally did. I made a bottom piece for it out of plywood, shielded it with aluminium tape and went to town building a rowdy Germanium fuzz with as many old Mojo parts as I could find. The stars of the show are a pair of Mullard transistors, coming in respectively at 57 and 78 hFE. There are also Sprague capacitors and Allen-Bradley carbon comp resistors. The rowdiness can be toned down by either using your guitar’s volume control or by a pair of trimpots on the inside of the unit.
This pedal is now for sale on Reverb: 38148493-veri-tone-geloso-germanium-fuzz-one-off.!