After I rescued G's Jimi Hendrix Dunlop Wah from a dusty life parked away in a corner of a control room, he presented me a first challenge. He said he was looking for a nice clean booster pedal, and that he had heard nice things about the Fulltone Fat Boost.

Well, that provided enough starting point. I looked it up and found the schematic and analysis of the Fulltone Fat Boost.

As you can read in the link, the Fulltone is a blatant copy of the Jack Orman's Mini Booster that was not intended as a commercial product but rather as a diy project supported from his website. Changes are the internal trimpots for tone and te detented gain pot (i.e. it's got 11 click-in positions instead of a smooth knob).

The circuit is basically oké, and I initially intended to make the Mini Booster and add a presence tone control network to preserve the features of the Fulltone, but in a better configuration.

While trying out the Mini Booster on breadboard -- it worked great -- the presence network provided some problems. While solving them I stumbled across a better, improved derivative from the Mini Booster that I just had to try: the FAT BOOSTERED.



--> all soldering on the board is done, offboard connections in place


--> fat caps for a fat booster D) only had 100V caps for the 1µF caps, which fit but not with much space left. It sounds very solid though, and is almost noiseless.

It is basically the minibooster, with integrated tone network. It proves to be a very flexible box, especially for people playing both single coils and humbuckers. If you're interested, read more about this circuit on the fantastic diystompboxes.com forum.


--> all wired up for testing!!


--> actual pots soldered on and wires bent into place

The box originally intended for the Flipster, which turned out too small, will now serve the purpose of being the testing shell for this circuit. Didn't make it into a stompbox yet, this is still the testing phase. It has some purpose to have it sitting on your amp so you can adjust the treble, bass, and gain. You can still flick it on boost/bypass. Should write something about the trouble you have around here finding appropriate diecast aluminium box.


--> tight in there, but all's fine


--> front with knobs attached, only DC power provision still to be finalised.