Pedal Building: The Centaur Clone

My guitar pedal building season 2022 started Monday March the 14th. It was a blustery day and the shade of the back deck made it almost unbearable, but I knew I had to get started sometime. My first pedal build was the Klon Centaur clone kit that I had just gotten a few days prior. I put this one ahead of my other builds as I felt time was important. Should there be any parts missing or issues arise with this pedal I would need to contact the seller as soon as possible. At present everything seems to be fine, for the most part.

My workspace on the back deck.

I started off as I always do; lowest components first and work upwards from there. I tested one of each component to make sure they were all labelled correctly. Can't be too careful! Everything was well marked on the main board, with the exception of one of the 100k resistors and the 821pf capacitor being a bit off, but I knew where they went after everything else was soldered up and they were the only parts left and their slightly misaligned places were left empty.

Stage 1

Stage 2

Stage 3

Once the main board was populated it was time to put everything into the housing and do some wiring. Wiring has to be my least favorite part of pedal building, but it has to be done. My distain for wiring was compounded by the fact the provided instructions are extremely vague on what wire goes where. I've wired up enough pedals to know how to wire up the input, output and DC jacks, but where on the board they go is the main mystery here. After doing some research I felt I had a good enough grasp on what went where and I went to work soldering it all up.

Stage 4

The problem is, I was wrong. Even after watching a few videos of people building it from start to finish and reading through some tutorials I still managed to get the output jack wired wrong. Once that was all squared away I had built a really nice pedal. Now, the elephant in the room is that this is a clone of an extremely well known and exceedingly sought after pedal that costs more than a decent used vehicle. That's exactly why I decided this was a project I was more than willing to tackle. I'll never own a real Centaur and even if this pedal doesn't replicate the tone exactly, what this pedal does still sounds pretty good to me. That means it's time for me to start my next project. Stay tuned!