Ibanez MT10 Mostortion

An effect from the 10 series, also known as the MT10. This was the very first effect I ever bought and it is still my main overdrive. Back in 1989 nobody was really interested in yet another overdrive/distortion so few were made, nowadays a clean MT10 starts at €250 because apparently half of Nashville is using these. They're easy to clone, Aion offers a nice kit, Effects Layouts has a PCB layout and there are also some vero board layouts out there, both with buffer and without buffer.

The challenge is to get hold of the original CA3260E opamp but the CA3260EZ will do too, you can get those from RS Components. If you really want the orginal you can try your luck on eBay or get the CA3260T Budgetronics is still offering. Those are CA3260E's in a TO-5 metal can package, looks pretty cool too.

Built the vero layout from Dirtbox Layouts which is a buffered layout.

Faced the same issue as with the Felis Fusor, the vero board was too wide so I had to remove a row on both sides. So the wiring looks crappy again. Also with five pots it's hard to tidy up the wiring so the board ended up pretty high and I had to bend some of the electrolytics. Maybe I should try to put three pots on top but I'd prefer to stick with the original setup because that's what I'm used to. Also maybe add an extra bottom row or use a smaller 1µF cap.

I do prefer putting the input and output wiring under the jack outputs. The ground wiring looks OK too just as the LED wiring.

As this is basically my own signature overdrive I came up with the very creative malapropism Monastortion. And how does it compare to the original? It now has a CA3260EZ inside and it sounds a tad different than the original, a bit brighter. So maybe even better than the real thing which sounds a bit muffled compared to the Monastortion. The difference is probably caused by the sum of all the component values that most probably varies a bit with that from the original.