Building fuzzes, early attempts

Back in 2000-2002 I built my first fuzz. It was a Fuzz Face clone with BC109C transistors. As I had no previous experience in electronics, I was pleasantly surprised it worked at the second try (after I switched around the transistors a couple of times to get the legs lined up...)

The old 2.2uF Sanyo electrolytic cap probably wasn't the greatest idea for an input cap and with no clue about biasing transistors, the high Hfe BC109Cs are probably not running very efficiently (iCircuit tells me Q2 Vce=7.31V)... The schematic looks like this:

All in all this box makes a lot of noise, chokes on the low end, oscillates like crazy and picks up all kinds of radio stations, but it worked! Even the LED lit up, albeit not very brightly behind that 470k resistor..

About that LED, I only figured that I needed about 1.5Volts to get it to work, so I set to finding a resistor that would give me around 1.5Volts, no clue about Amperes... (iCircuit tells me the Voltage over the LED is in fact 1.383Volts) :-)

After this succes I decided to build another one, but it sounded whimpy, I figured I must've done something wrong, so I set to building yet another one, which didn't work at all, so I scrapped the whole DIY project and put everything in a closet for 12 years.

I did use this Fuzz Face a couple of times, but it kept breaking, because of crappy wiring, so eventually it got an early retirement..