Build Your Own Clone Message Board

Hey y'all. Last night was kinda frustrating! I'm pretty new to all this, bad at soldering still, but I was optimistic. My British Blues Overdrive had worked fine, once I remembered to put the ic in its socket. I had the enclosures for this filter and the opticomp (I'll be posting about that in a sec!!) all painted and went to assemble them last night, but ran into problems with both.



On this guy, the fixed wah seems to work fine, no noise or anything. The full sweep of the manual pot seems to be good. The first time I plugged it in, the envelope worked good too. There was a long, whooping attack. I was psyched. Then it cut out. No more sound comes out when the pedal is engaged and the switch is in the left position. Bypass works fine, LED comes on and stays on in both switch positions. Everything is stock 'cept for a bright blue led to match the paint.

My good camera is at my gf's, so that's about the best picture I could get. If no one comes up with the solution off this, I'll post some better shots of the top and I'll pull the jacks out and get a shot of the underside. I have access to a multimeter, but don't know what to do to test out the circuit voltages.

Thanks a million in advance guys. There's something really neat going on with this community.

Just to add, if I turn my amp waaaaay up, I can hear a bit of sound with the envelope filter engaged.

more pictures:

You could do with cropping back a lot of those components leads.

Since the pedal worked briefly that might be a construction error or a bad joint, but it might also point in the direction of a spontaneous failure of one of the IC's. At a guess I would say it might be the op-amp. If you have a suitable equivalent, swap out the op-amp (the 8pin chip).

Once you do get it working again you will likely find the Manual control is useless - it stays at the same low frequency until half of its rotation and then shoots up quickly to too high a frequency. There is a mod for this in the mods section.