During March of 2022, I happened upon an estate sale of a prior production manager for General Electric from the 50’s until the 70’s, where he had overseen the production of germanium transistors. As relayed to me by his daughter, she and her brother were selling all of their dad’s treasures he had collected over the decades (He passed away at 91 years old). From the information I was able to find at the time, (standing in the man’s backyard using my phone to search the web), a few of the part numbers were known in the audio world (G.E. 2N527, 2N1370, etc) and they were germanium! That immediately piqued my interest.
When you eyed his vast collection, you could immediately tell this gentleman was a true renaissance man; his workshop contained not only an electronics lab complete with lots of test equipment, but also a woodshop, a full metal shop and even a chemistry section full of chemicals, microscopes, and beakers -enough to make a mad scientist blush.
Over two days I purchased a trunk load of treasures, from military test gear to vintage Ampex speakers and microphones, (his wife had a long career with the Ampex company). However, the best part of, and the reason I have shared this story: a collection of germanium transistors from every era of manufacture. Some from the 50’s, the 60’s, and possibly even the 70’s. Getting specific information/datasheets for these parts has been difficult, and for some completely impossible
Many bags of transistors, subdivided into bags based on some sort of test protocol (My guess is HFE, all the testing I’ve done points to this being the case), al from a bygone era of delicious germanium semiconductors.
All in all, over the two days I managed to get 15 shoe boxes full of bags of transistors -as a rough estimate, at least a few thousand in total. I have no clue why this gentleman took it upon himself to acquire all of these, I have no idea where he got them, but I am so happy he did.
The markings this man had put on the bags were helpful in some instances, not helpful at all in others. Some have long leads, some have short leads, some were obviously installed in something at one time. Others look like they only went through his sorting process (clean legs, no solder evidence.)
Fast forward a couple of weeks, and I managed to sort through all of the goodies (for some crazy reason, I was the only person interested in this stuff and was able to leave with all of it) and it looked like there were enough transistors to think about maybe making some pedals. I have always been a fan of the vintage fuzz pedals, especially the first generation PNP Germanium pedals: Rangemaster, Fuzz Face, and Tone Bender, to be specific.
I spent a few weeks running all of these transistors through my test jig for determining HFE (gain) and leakage and found that not only were the majority of them in the right range, they also exhibited low leakage as well.
The next step was to try them in some original fuzz circuits, so I built a few of the circuits, listened and decided (easy decision) to put out some pedals with these transistors.
So now I have hundreds and hundreds of germanium transistors that test good- what to do? Build some pedals and spread the good fortune to anyone that wants a legit, period correct germanium based 1/2/3 transistor gain circuit.
So, that’s the backstory on how the “2nd Wind” series came to be. I have put a quantity of the transistors away for support for the 2nd Wind production and will build as many pedals as the number of transistors I have dictates.
For more detailed explanations of these pedals, see the individual product pages.