In 2009 the original Way Huge Aqua Puss mk1 was reversed on freestompboxes.org and revealed to be a slight variation of the Boss DM-2 with Panasonic MN3005 Delay Chip.
There was a community project and a PCB made up and luckily I managed to get one of the last ones in 2012. It spent some time in a box until I finally got around to finishing it a few years ago. Unfortunately, many of the original links and pictures were dead by the time I got around to working on it so I had to kind of scrape the few tidbits and a BOM together to finish the pedal. The early Aquaboy project on madbeanpedals.com, which was at first focussed on the Way Huge version rather than the original DM-2 was a great help. It featured the schematic and a partslist that could be related to the original schematic.
I managed to finish the pedal, put it in a tall 1590BB and even calibrate it with the DM-2 instructions. This is how it originally looked. I built it exclusively with Dale CMF55 resistors and wima and panasonic caps. I order to make it as high quality as possible, I also drilled holes for the little tabs to keep the potentiometers from turning. Usually everyone just clips those tabs off, but they have a reason. Unfortunately that meant the holes could be seen next to the knobs, which isn't such a pretty look.
I decided to add a control plate to hide the extra holes for the pots and to tell me which knob is controlling which function. This is made from PCB material without copper tracks and was designed in Eagle. It looks really good now in my opinion.
As the PCB I acquired was the last of the FSB community PCBs, and I started getting the hang of Eagle, I then decided to make my own PCB and maybe try a few mods and sell a few pedals if there is more interest. It took a few days, but I made a PCB layout that was inspired by the original Aqua Puss, but a bit smaller, giving me more room to work with in the box and maybe allow mods like double time and modulation. I got them fabricated and they came out awesome and work beautifully and for some reason are quieter than the FSB version.
I have a few left for sale on my site including a download with partslist and schematic for anyone who wants to try to build their own.
This is the second Aqua Puss Mk1 I built, the first with my own PCB.
(this one actually has the first version of my PCB, which required two jumpers to work because I forgot the connections on the schematic. V2 shown above now has more generous distances between the components and works right away).
My third version was built with some tantalum capacitors instead of the electrolytic caps near the BBD to allow for a double delay board daughter board that plugs into the original BBD socket. I traced sabrotones dual delay board and made my own PCB that I got fabricated. It works as expected and calibration is not as difficult as I thought. One simply has to calibrate with one BBD as usual and then plug the BBD into the first slot on the double delay board and calibrate the second BBD with the remaining trimmers the same way.
This is the finished product. I decided to rename it the Acqua Vitae to avoid issues with copyright and underline it's not a straight "replica" like the FSB board, but rather a reinvention inspired by the original APmk1. It sounds noticeably warmer/darker with two BBDs but the delay time more than doubled (I'm guessing due to the additional darkness clock noise is filtered slightly better and the BBDs can be adjusted for longer delay times). I guess the tantalums in the signal path also darken the signal slightly.
I'm currently working on a version with modulation and a few more quirks that I will talk about in another post.
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