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PostPosted: Tue Oct 17, 2017 8:33 am 
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I've built a BYOC wah pedal (finally) and it sounds really great.

Problem is, it works fine in the hand, but not good under the foot.

In the pic below, you can see the pedal shaft is 1/2 or 3/8 on the pot gear. The picture angle makes it look like more, but shouldn't the post gear be more to the right so the shaft teeth are all on the gear? When rocking the pedal with my foot it's extremely gritty and slips gears somewhat.

It appears the shaft isn't far enough on the pot gear to fully engage and the white tension deal that presses the shaft to the gear does not adjust enough to push the shaft into the gear.

How does one adjust this? I'm afraid to use the pedal and strip the teeth.

I also found the same description in this post, but no fix. viewtopic.php?f=33&t=47714


Attachments:
WahPedalShaft.jpg
WahPedalShaft.jpg [ 150.68 KiB | Viewed 2619 times ]


Last edited by paulman5 on Mon Oct 23, 2017 2:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 17, 2017 1:07 pm 
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I haven't run into that issue before. But it looks like you should be able to slide the gear down onto the pot shaft a bit more (slide it to the right referencing your pic). Is that the case? Can the gear grommet be moved?

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PostPosted: Wed Oct 18, 2017 3:41 am 
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I’m having a hard time trying to figure out exactly what the problem here is. Lets start by getting our terminology correct first. The gear drive for a wah pedal is a rack and pinion setup. The gear on the shaft of the pot is a pinion gear. The straight bar with teeth on it is the rack.

If you are wanting the rack to be centered on the pinion gear you can try to slide the pinion gear further onto the pot’s shaft. The pinion gear may have a pin in it that holds it in place on the pot’s shaft so that may not be an option. In that case I would place both of the large washers in your photo on the right side of the U-shaped mount for the pot. This will move the pot a little to the right placing the rack a little closer to the center of the pinion gear.

If the problem you are having is that the teeth of the pinion gear are not meshing properly with the teeth of the rack gear you may need to get a different wah pot or rack. I purchased a pot off of Reverb a while back and the teeth on the pinion gear did not match up properly with the rack gear’s teeth of my BYOC wah shell. When I would rock the treadle up and down it didn’t move smoothly. I no longer had a Dunlop wah shell so I wasn’t able to see if the Reverb pot I bought would work more smoothly with the Dunlop rack gear. IIRC I found a spare rack gear in my parts box that I used to replace the one in the BYOC shell to get the treadle to move more smoothly.

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PostPosted: Mon Oct 23, 2017 2:29 pm 
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The issue seems to be resolved now.

Thank you for all the suggestions. This is a pure-byoc pedal, meaning all the electronics and rack and pinion came with the pedal. It was strange however; the footswitch, rack and pinion pot were already mounted in the enclosure. My assumption was (after reading the instructions) these were already installed and adjusted at the mother ship to avoid loss and breakage of the switch or rack and pinion.

So, I spaced the pinion pot with a couple of pennies epoxy-tacked onto the mounting washer on the pot side. Yes, I definitely got my two cents in this pedal. This made more pinion on the rack, but there is still about 1/16 of rack that does not mesh with the pinion. And yes, the pinion gear is pinned in place so there is no chance of moving it on the shaft.

The spacing was tight, as the shims took the pot out almost to the end of the threads. I was able to get the nut threaded and tight on the pot mount. I didn't realize there was still play in the mount, so after pushing the pot as far "back" as possible (toward the rear of the pedal) and then tightening the whole thing up the rack and pinion meshed was much tighter. Not too tight though, it seems to be perfect now.

So after some head scratching and fine adjustment, the pedal mechanics work well now. It would be great if the rack was much more "in" the pinion gear, but the world ain't perfect.

Thanks all, hope this helps someone else in the future too.


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