They shall be yours for your projects. Just say the word. I'd give you the sparkle spray also but unfortunately I don't think our governments are too into explosive parcels...

No need to push the envelope when they will already be wondering why a grown man is shipping a partially used packet of craft sparkles to another grown man across borders.

That looks fucking swell.

There is nothing but pure, unadulterated winsauce about this whole box of noise.

That is triumphant.

Also, Red Blooded Ballplayer should be used as a title for something.

Finished building! And! It dun work.

Does the build doc have voltages and shit?

Did you adjust all of the trimmers for 4.5v or whatever they want for the pedal?

I didn't do that yet.

I figured it'd work, just badly, before I adjust them...

Nosir. If the FETs are not biased right, they won't do much of anything...

Think I'll be grabbing the voltmetre and doing some adjusting...

I don't believe I know what I'm doing.

My metre is working because I can get it to read 9V off a battery...

But it doesn't read shit inside the pedal.

Maybe I screwed up.

If I poke where the AC adapter plugs in and ground I don't get any power reading out. Hmm...

Does your meter have auto ranging or someshit? Because the wall will be AC, and the pedal will be DC.

For measuring pedal voltages, you would set the meter to DC, attach the negative/black probe solidly to ground(like with an alligator clip) and then use the other probe to touch to solder points on on the PCB to take DC voltage readings.

For measuring wall voltage, you would set the thing to AC, put one probe in one side of the plug, and the other probe in the other side of the plug, no connection to ground. You should not need to do anything with that though.

With the voltmetre set to DC I got a 9V reading off the AC adapter and the battery... but the insides of the pedal, including the jack for the AC adapter, have nothing.

So you want to follow the red lead to the PCB. Measure if it is bringing 9v there at the solder. If not, fix the soldering so it is. If it is, follow the PCB trace to the next point and see where in the circuit you are losing it.

Double check the polarity of all diodes and electrolytic capacitors. Make sure that there are no notes in the instructions indicating that any of the screenings on the PCB are incorrect with respect to things like component polarity.

Just follow the signal until you lose it, and then figure out why you are losing it. If you want to send me the build documents, i could maybe help a bit more, i don't know.

Aha. Think I've found the problem. As Chris suggests I start from the jack, poking around with my multimetre... seems I had the jacks wired up all wrong like. Now the circuit does what it should when I poke at it, so far. Sadly in the process I have stripped the plastic threads for the "in" jack.

Ballz. Plastic jacks? Are they the Cliff/Neutrik type like they use in Marshalls?

This is some thick chewy distortion. The bass knob is the most effective knob on the pedal. Man, this is a pretty fine pedal so far.

It also makes an interesting 'mooOOO?' sound if you roll the gain knob at its max extent. I suppose this must be what unicorns sound like.

Until I get the jack worked out it has its back off and its guts hanging out. I wonder what to do about that. But LOOK.



Jack on the left = Cannot screw nuts in to attach to chassis properly. D'oh! Also D'oh, is that I should have determined how visible the letters would be once the knobs are on, since they partially cover them.



Sparkle sparkle



Note meaningful location of LED...

Edit: Yarr Chris, it is the Marshall type.

The Moooo sound is parasitic oscillation. Common in high gain circuits, you might be able to get rid of it if you want to spend some time moving wires around, maybe re-running some, and possibly using some thin shielded cable for the wires between the jacks, switch, and board.

Depending on how much distortion you have and need from it, it might not be worth it to you to go through the trouble of doing that.

You *may* also get lucky and find that merely putting the back cover on will add enough shielding to the works to give the thing enough stability not to oscillate.

I rather like the moo. I'd like to say it's the sound the unicorn makes. Can't I have that?

It certainly is gainy though. It doesn't seem to be able to do classic crunch... just distorted and really distorted. I suppose I *could* take it down a notch. They supplied lower gain transistors for that option. But do I want that option? Hmmm. Hmmmmm.

Those are the Marshall jacks in the photos, yes?

Oh, by all means, keep the MooOOO. It is fairly fitting, IMO, that the pedal should also act as a Unicorn Call.

As for lower gain, why? If you are going to use the thing at live volumes, maybe, as too much distortion can make the guitar disapear, but i think that this sort of pedal tends to work best for giving you proper fizzfuzz at lower volumes. For that i would probably leave it full-on.

If the transistors were socketed, i might try the lower gain ones out, but if it meant desoldering from the board, i think the lazy in me would win out.

And yeah, that is the style that they use in the Marshall maps. I would guess that OLC uses the cheaper Neutrik versions of them though. I actually really like those jacks, though i have fucked up one or two of those plastic nuts. You can order just the nuts from electronics distributors and some amp parts places. Then you could get the red ones and pretend you were Snaxoforte.