Build Your Own Clone Message Board

I finished this build yesterday. It's functioning normally, other than after using it for a bit it starts spitting scratchy sound popping and the volume pumps in and out.

The noise sounds like something isn't grounded properly. I've made sure the nuts are all very tight, and all the solder joints are solid: 40% / 60% lead / tin solder, I tinned the wires, I used flux regularly, I wiped the whole thing down with isopropyl alcohol. Is that sound possibly because the paint isn't letting the jacks make proper contact with the chassis?

When I took these pictures, I had the Q2 transistor installed incorrectly. The pedal didn't perform properly then, with some odd behaviour from the volume and gain knobs. I noticed I had mixed up which leads go into which socket, and fixed it. After that, the pedal performs properly, other than the LED and the faint scratchy noise.

By the way, in the third pic, the leads of the Q2 transistor are in the wrong holes. I noticed that and fixed them already.

I've made a discovery!

As I said, the scratchy noise occurs sporadically. I was playing for a few hours today with the ESV germanium in the signal path, sometimes on, and sometimes off, before the issue occurred again.

When the issue occurred again, the pedal was in BYPASS mode.

When the pedal is in BYPASS mode, and the issue occurs, the light on the pedal flickers in synchronicity with the static / cracking / scratchy sounds coming from the amp.

Here are a couple of short videos showing it happen.





The scratchy sound isn't very audible because the amp volume was very quiet (playing in the middle of the night). However, if you crank your speakers, you can hear it in the 2nd video (the one that doesn't have me fiddling around with notes) while it's happening.

I cleaned the footswitch wiring a bunch and have used the pedal for many more hours without the issue recurring. So, maybe some flux residue was creating an intermittent short.