pedal worked.. until i encased it

[yonie]

I just finished my third pedal build.

I decided something a bit harder would be fun, so I made a Big Muff clone. I had it fully working yesterday on a piece of cardboard. This morning I disconnected everything and put it in it's final case.

Now it stopped working. When switched off (true bypass) all is fine. When I switch on the pedal the LED does power on but there is no sound at all from the circuit. It's dead silent.

Do you guys have any tips on where to start fixing this?

[Trout]

Originally Posted by yonie

I just finished my third pedal build.

I decided something a bit harder would be fun, so I made a Big Muff clone. I had it fully working yesterday on a piece of cardboard. This morning I disconnected everything and put it in it's final case.

Now it stopped working. When switched off (true bypass) all is fine. When I switch on the pedal the LED does power on but there is no sound at all from the circuit. It's dead silent.

Do you guys have any tips on where to start fixing this?

Double check all connections first. This happened to me once... I'd forgotten to connect the case to ground (needed to run a wire to one of the ring connections on one of the jacks.

[Montana_Dawg]

Originally Posted by yonie

I just finished my third pedal build.

I decided something a bit harder would be fun, so I made a Big Muff clone. I had it fully working yesterday on a piece of cardboard. This morning I disconnected everything and put it in it's final case.

Now it stopped working. When switched off (true bypass) all is fine. When I switch on the pedal the LED does power on but there is no sound at all from the circuit. It's dead silent.

Do you guys have any tips on where to start fixing this?

Start by checking that the transistor pins are correct in the circuit.

One thing to note: you should never work on any kind of paper product, even with transistors. Electrostatic Discharge will damage active components.

[yonie]

Thanks! I was going through the wiring, when I remembered the 3PDT had a suspicious solder joint (came nearly loose while soldering a wire to it) so I tried another 3PDT. To my surprise that fixed the problem!

Thankfully I can quickly close the pedal up, it's become a little bit of a mess in there

Thanks for your help, I'll keep the Electrostatic Discharge caution in mind for my next project.

[rcole_sooner]

Check that the circuit is not grounding to the case, where it should not be. Cases are pretty tight and it is easy to get something touching the side that should not be.