The Lovepedal Eternity is one of the most hyped overdrive pedals around at the moment – it offers a great “clean boost” and some classic lead tones. With the current dealer price around $300 and ridiculous ebay prices too, this was another target for the [K]loners.
Like many boutique pedals the Lovepedal Eternity uses a layer of black epoxy “goop” to stop potential kloners seeing the circuit board. Luckily it’s not too difficult to remove. I’ve seen a number of “de-gooped” Eternity’s and it turns out to be nothing more than a modified version of Jack Orman’s “Son of a Screamer” overdrive (Although it does still sound very nice!) circuit which is basically a minimal version of the age old Tubescreamer overdrive.
Ok, on with the build:
Here you can see the enclosure which has been marked and drilled out ready to take the hardware. What are those 4 small holes on the side for? Well, wait and you will soon find out!
Here I’m just checking everything fits into place – note the 4! LED’s down the side of the unit. It is the same on the other side, a nice change to the regular single LED status indicators.
Instead of painting the Eternity I decided to have a go at etching the enclosure with Ferric Chloride Acid. Here you can see the cleaned enclosure and transfer, which is just laser printer toner on glossy magazine paper, ready to be ironed together.
Here is the etched enclosure – Unfortunately I forgot to take pictures of the etching process, silly me. Anyway – it looks great. I decided to call my pedal the “Lovestuff – Ecstasy Overdrive” 😉
Hardware mounted and internal wiring underway. Usually the guts of Lovepedal’s aren’t the neatest, I wanted mine to be much neater internally than the actually Eternity pedal I had seen :-0
Instead of creating a PCB for this build I decided to create the Eternity on perfboard. It is, therefore, wired point to point – this means there is more “Mojo” included in the circuit (I also used solder made from ground Unicorn horn and the wire is carefully wound from the hair of Mermaids. Top quality stuff for all that added mojo and tone!)
Here the Eternity is nice and snug. Ready for the final internal wiring to take place.
A finished Lovepedal Eternity, err, I mean Lovestuff Ecstasy Overdrive!
The finishing touch, a custom signed base plate! Pedal Pirate forever!
Here’s a finished picture – all plugged in and working! Looks good doesn’t it 🙂
Here’s another – still looking good. The controls are: Top left = “Drive”, Top Right = “Level” and the lower middle is “Glass” (as it is labeled on the original Eternity, it is actually just a standard tone control).
Now you see why I wanted to use all those LED’s! How great does that look? Notice that I changed some of the red LED’s to yellow ones for even more mojo!
So there it is – a DIY clone of the popular Lovepedal Eternity overdrive pedal. What does it sound like? Well, it sounds just like all the sound samples of the Eternity, a great overdrive tone.A great thanks to all those who made this project possible – you all know who you are…For more information on this project feel free to email me, you can find my address at the top of the page.
By popular demand – The Lovepedal Eternity “Burst” edition Schematic & Layout (thanks to LovePedalDetective for the layout):
Also a De-Gooped Lovepedal Eternity (From LovePedalDetectives album 🙂 :
Here you can clearly see it’s just a Son Of a Screamer circuit 🙁 If you want info on the other variations of the Lovepedal E get over to freestompboxes.org and search for the Eternity thread – there is loads of good stuff there.