I am currently working on mods for the Daphon 20 range of pedals.
E20OD Daphon Overdrive Sheepshagger Mod
I have completed a great mod for the E20OD Daphon Overdrive pedal.
The mod is called The Sheepshagger and takes the Daphon into boutique territory.
The Daphon already has the JRC4558D op amp and the mod changes resistors R12 and R14 to bring the pedal into 808 territory. I used carbon film but metal film would be suitable.
The main modification is to the clipping section where the standard parts are removed and replaced with high quality 1n4001 rectifier diodes which drop the voltage and give the pedal a rich creamy tube sound. (You can change the clipping diodes on any overdrive or distortion pedal to experiment with this effect).
The Daphon uses the Boss asymmetrical clipping method with 3 diodes. The Ibanez uses just 2 to give symmetrical clipping. A switch located on the top of the pedal allows you to simply ‘take out’ one of the diodes and select either Ibanez clipping or Boss clipping.
If you want some serious gain I found putting an LED in the switchable diode (D6) and lowering the value of the resistor at R12 gave this a huge amount more distortion. I call this the Ugg Boot option. Also placing a jumper at C3 allowed more bass through the circuit but too much for my ear.
Other mods on the pedal change various capacitors for simple high fidelity upgrades to stock electronic components such as poly film caps at C6, C11 and C12 etc. These hi fi mods are the bread and butter modifications to pretty much all pedals and it’s really a case of trial and error.
Also I removed C16 which eliminated a filter.
Daphon E20TR Tremolo Cattle Prod Mod
I’ve been wanting to check out the E20TR for a while now, but I’ve been happy with the Tremolo on my Vox Cambridge and to be honest, it’s not an effect I use a lot. I have a Johnson 50’s Tremolo that I got for next to nothing on an auction and it’s been good enough for my purposes when I’m not using the Vox.
I got an email from a guy who had a Daphon Tremolo E20TR and reported that it had the same volume drop problem as the Boss TR2 and it prompted me to have a look inside the E20TR. The Daphon board is not the same as the Boss TR2 because the fixes I was looking at on the forums for the Boss did not work with the Daphon.
I found a suggestion that pointed to replacing one resistor to fix the volume drop issue. The resistor is 18k but I experimented a lot here and found that around 8.2k to 10k fixed the volume drop problem.
While working trough the various resistor values it became obvious that a variable resistor hooked into the circuit here could be used to add a Level control to the Daphon and by turning down the Depth control to nothing the pedal could be used as a boost option. I used a 100k pot for this that was surplus (i.e I ordered the wrong size) to a repair I did on a Boss OS2. The pot has to be installed in series with a 10k resistor to prevent it shagging any ICs.
Other modders have done similar things with the Boss TR2’s I’m told so the circuit must be fairly similar to the Boss.
Removing one capacitor in the tone circuit – the 100pf at C7, gave the pedal a nice sparkle as well.
I’m happy with the finished result but have no doubt that there are other improvements that could be made.
Daphon E20CM Compressor
I bought one of these off the Fatshopper guys to see if it was worth modding. The first thing I noticed was that it was a pretty sharp compressor straight out of the box.
I’ve been playing around with some mods to the Boss CS3 and have almost finished a mod I’m going to call the Wool Press for the Boss. At present that mod is too much ‘Wool’ and not enough ‘Press’ but it’s coming along.
Each time I go back to the Daphon, I can’t fault it.
I’ll keep it handy for a rainy day and go through the circuit and upgrade the components when I have some time, but it’s definitely on the back burner for now.
The Boss needs my time more 🙂