Noisy Cricket MKII Build

My first build of the 2023 season was completed on the 6th of March, and it wasn't a pedal. I've wanted to dip my toes into the world of guitar amps, but high voltages aren't something a dumb person like myself want to tango with, even though I did repair my Kalamazoo Model 1. I decided to start off small, with some LM386 based amplifiers, and built a Noisy Cricket MKII. Technically I had the circuit soldered up for a few weeks prior, but I don't give a circuit its birthday until it's functional, so that meant I had to add the potentiometers, switches, input and output, etc. before I officially considered it a build.

She ain't pretty, but she's as functional as can be expected. After everything was put together and tested, I was pretty excited that I finally built a guitar amplifier, albeit a tiny solid-state based one, but a guitar amp nonetheless! As the excitement of having done so kept pushing me to play with the amp, I started formulating plans on what I could do to make it more my amp, instead of just another Noisy Cricket. 

Noisy Cricket MKII Front

I've decided a few mods will include hardwiring the bass capacitor into the circuit, instead of having a selectable switch on the front of the amp. The aforementioned bass switch will then become the grit switch, which is kind of a boost/overdrive. Since the stock tone control doesn't really do much, I'll work on a BMP tone stack and integrate that for more tonal shaping than it currently offers. Finally I think I want to put it into something a little more attractive than an old, disused PC PSU enclosure. The disused PC PSU enclosure was really just an act of desperation, to get the thing into a useable form and it not be just a mess of wires.

Noisy Cricket MKII Side

I'm fairly happy with the product that came from building my Noisy Cricket. I was testing it through the little extension speaker from my Lyon AMP3 and that sounded pretty good, but the real shocker was when I tested it through my 4x12 cabinet, and it actually sounds pretty good through that as well. I do plan to build more LM386 based amplifiers in the future, but I really want to build either a clone of my Kalamazoo Model 1 or a 5F1 style kit. I'll have to save that for when I know quite a bit more about building and safety than I currently do.