I just finished building my Crown Jewel (v1.1) yesterday and I love it. It sounds terrific. But there were a few points during the build where I wanted to chuck the whole thing at the wall.
- The instructions say to put several components on the underside of the board, but the pictures show them on the top. I realize this is for the dry blend module, but it's still confusing. Moreover, since the pictures are of a 1.0 board, not 1.1, that further muddies the waters.
- Mounting the PCB was maddening. It took me at least 10 tries and I wound up having to do the components in stages to make it work. It would have been very helpful to know that the internal nut and lock washer on the switches were unnecessary, since they made it much harder to get the heights of the components matched up.
- Soldering the pots onto the board before the leads to the jacks and footswitches is really problematic and unnecessary. Most of the pots came with dust covers, which helps, but the dual gang pot did not. Because I'd already soldered them on, I could either remove them or somehow cut off the trailing lead underneath the pot so it didn't contact any of the casing and short to ground. Since getting the pots placed was so difficult, this meant wedging a box cutter under the pot to saw off the leads. Not fun.
- The footswitches and DC jack didn't have anything underneath, so they don't have the same problem, but getting the iron wedged in without burning other components was very tough. Again, soldering the leads before mounting the PCB might have made more sense. This isn't an option with the internal nut DC jack, of coruse. I'm sure there's some reason why your designs favor them, but I've never understood it. I tried ordering the external one, but you were out of stock.
I realize this sounds like a lot of complaining, but I really do love the pedal. I'm having a little trouble with added noise and the 18V mode doesn't seem to do much but make it very quiet, but they're fairly small problems and are doubtless my own fault.
Thank you for running BYOC. You make great pedals and, all in all, I really enjoy building them.