Send in the Clones
There are several clones or semi-clones of the TS series on the market. The schematic of the signal path of the TS series on my web page, as I mentioned, and it is entirely reasonable to hand wire one, using a DPDT stomp switch for bypass and applying your own personal Guitar God Mods along the way.
I also have a stripboard (Vero-board) layout there if you'd like to use that board technology, as well as toner transfer sheets to iron on a circuit board for the TS circuit. In these versions, I used the whole audio path, input and output emitter followers and everything. They fit nicely inside the Hammond 1590BB cast aluminum box, and come with wiring diagrams to wire the box up.
I used the emitter followers for both the toner sheet versions and for the vero board versions in case there was some subtle effect from them being there, on the theory that those folks who claim to hear sonic differences between the 808 and 9 can't ALL be wrong. Strictly speaking, if you do a good job of setting up the biasing for the clipping opamp with a high value resistor of about half a meg or so instead of the 10K that is used in the stock unit, the input emitter follower is probably not needed.
If you decide that the 808/9 folks are all wet, the output one isn't either, and if you delete these and use the DPDT stomp switch, you come up with a single chip version that is remarkably easy to build. Mark Amundson proposed this idea to me about a year and a half ago, using a CMOS opamp for the relative softness of the clipping that CMOS based amps give.
Jack Orman seems to have rediscovered this concept later to come up with his "Son of Screamer" article, which does not use the CMOS opamp.
If you decide that the magic might be in that output buffer, you can also just leave off the input buffer with appropriate circuit changes.
If you want to experiment with either of these, you can use either the toner layout or the veroboard layout, and just leave the input and output followers off, using instead a 510K biasing resistor at the (+) input to the clipping amp, and returning the volume control "cold" lug to ground instead of to the bias voltage, as some models of the TS series do.
Apparently the good sound of the TS series has not been lost on the boutique effects makers. Reportedly, there are a number of TS clones available in that market.
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