Build Your Own Clone Message Board

Hi everyone,

I need help with my build of the 5 knobs compressor.
As soon as the pedal is powered and a jack in the input the led turn on. The led stay on when I used the footwitch. The pedal dont let the signal through, no sound at all. The knobs and footswitch doesn’t have any effect.

I can’t find what I did wrong on the pedal. It is my second build, the first one being a fully fonctional leeds fuzz.

PS : I don’t think I can add more than one picture per message with the iphone, so I will add the other picture in the following message. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Here are the first 3.

then

then

Your photos are too small. We need to see as much detail as possible. If the PCB actually filled the entire photo they would probably reveal a whole lot more usable information. As they are they don’t help a whole lot.

_________________
"It’s your soldering."

finally

Hi Stephen,

Yes the photos have been cut when uploaded, not sure why...

I will try another way to upload them, maybe with another platform.

Going on what little I can see in your photos I’d be willing to bet that the problem is with your soldering and/or wire dressing. The soldering of the jacks look cold. The adapter soldering and wire dressing is a mess.

See the following threads for tips and advice on your build.
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=52211
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=6401

_________________
"It’s your soldering."

I would agree with Stephen. Those links are well worth a read.

The most pressing thing to address is all the exposed wire you have. Any bare metal that risks touching any other bare metal can cause a problem.

1. On board mounted components, you need to cut the protruding leads down as close to the solder joint as you can.

2. On the input/output and power jacks, you need to have much less exposed wire. Strip back the insulation to expose just enough wire to bend and crimp around the solder lugs, then twist and tin the wire strands and make the connection. You have probably 3-4x the length of bare wire needed.

_________________
Scott

My band, Austin Hollow

Here's another thread to check out that focuses on how to clean up your soldering:

viewtopic.php?f=9&t=52188

From what I've seen here over the course of many hundreds of posts is that it's the wiring connections between the PCB and hardware (jacks, footswitch, lugged pots in older kits) that tend to be the biggest soldering challenge for novice builders. A couple of tips:

• Prepping the ends of your wires properly is an important start. Strip off 1/8" to 1/4" of the insulation, twist the wire strands as tightly as you can between thumb & forefinger, and then apply a SMALL amount of solder to the wire end (a.k.a. "tinning"). This should be just enough to bond the strands together; if you can't still see the individual strands clearly, you've used too much solder and should dab some off with the tip of your iron.
• When you solder the wire in place, insert the stripped end all the way up to the eyelet or lug you're soldering to. Exposed wire = bad thing, as it can be a source of power or signal shorts. And be sure to trim the excess wire end down to the solder joint after making the connection, along with any stray wire strands sticking out anywhere.
• Here's a tip for the I/O jacks: the solder tabs on these jacks have some sort of thin coating on them that impedes the wetting action of the molten solder and may cause it to "ball up," resulting in the dreaded cold joint. I suggest scuffing them up with a bit of sandpaper before soldering, which exposes fresh metal surface and allows the solder to wet the surface properly. Makes a BIG difference.

Re: the LED being on all the time, I would suggest that you carefully inspect the solder joints for the footswitch connections on the PCB, specifically eyelets 1 and 2. If there is any solder "bridging" present between these two solder joints, the LED will be lit whenever power is supplied to the pedal.

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“My favorite programming language is SOLDER” - Bob Pease (RIP)

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