What I found was that right off the bat, things weren’t working. I had shorted the tip rings from the input jack straight to the output jack and had gotten nothing. Now that was strange. Turns out when I tried to star ground my ground wires, one of them (the ground from the output) wasn’t contacting properly. I whipped out the soldering gun and fixed that up quickly enough and I had a proper ground contact. I got so excited during the soldering phase. I was hoping with all my might that this was the last problem and that I’d be able to start working on getting this in the case that’s been sitting there taunting me.

Unfortunately that wasn’t the end of my problems. There’s still an issue somewhere. But I know that I’m now getting signal into the board and I’m set up to do some better debugging. I am thinking that I might have messed something up while doing short tests so I’ll have to spend some more time very carefully following the signal path. I think I know where it’s dying, but I’m not positive yet. I have to say that I am considering giving up on this one, but at the same time, the gauntlet has been thrown down and it’s tough to just abandon it right now. I want to be sure I’ve exhausted my debugging abilities before I do. If I’ve just made a mess of soldering things on the board, I might just bail and order a pre-etched board. But until I can confirm that I’ll keep trying every month or so.

The great thing about the Orange Squeezer was that its effects were quit transparent. It did its thing without altering your sound much. In hindsight, perhaps this wasn’t the best type of pedal to start with… If I had tried a distortion, delay, phaser, chorus, etc… I would have immediately noticed whether it was working or not.

On the bright side I’ve got access to an oscilloscope so I’ll be able to see what it’s actually doing to the input signal. I think that will help me out. If it’s all good and everything is as it should be, I’ll still have to make the mods to the soldered board but as I found out today, they’re not going to be as dramatic as I’d feared.

Here’s hoping.

On the advice of Dave Green I then pulled up the spec sheet on my JFETs to make sure I hadn’t gummed up my layout. That’s when I noticed a problem. When comparing my layout to the original schematic I noticed that I had a resistor going to ground instead of feeding back into a JFET source. The good news was that it would be really easy to fix.

Then came the bad news, uppon closer inspection I realised that I mixed up the source, gate and drain pins. This is a really bad thing that likely won’t be easy to fix on the board I’ve alreayd soldered. But it’s late right now and I’m going to wait until I get it working properly on the solderless board first. If I can get it working properly there, then I’ll know exactly what needs to be changed to get my already soldered board working.

Lessons learned:

1. Taking shortcuts like skipping a solderless breadboard prototype when you’ve never built a pedal before is not a good idea, no matter how much you tell yourself that you’ll be really careful not to make mistakes.
2. You’re going to make mistakes, so make sure it’s easy to fix them (see lesson #1)
3. Buying two of all of the parts you need is a really, really, really good idea when you’re starting out. Even if you prototype it properly, you may screw something up while soldering. If you do, you don’t want to be waiting for another order to come in or waiting for the electronics shop to open.
4. Be patient when you make a mistake (see lesson #2)

I’ve spent some time tonight putting all my information together and posted at DIY Stompboxes to try and get myself some help. One problem is that I’m getting twice the voltage I should be at three of the IC pins and I’m getting 0 one of the Q2 pins. That 0 is supposed to be small, like 0.6 according to the General Guitar Gadgets report, but certainly not 0. Messing with the trimpot didn’t change a thing so I’m a bit past my understanding of things and I hope that some kind soul at DIY stomboxes will be able to help me identify what could be going wrong.

I just finished clipping off the wire ends. I still have to de-solder the left over bits off of the posts and then will need to re-solder the whole thing all over again. Although I’m not overjoyed at doing all that work over again, I’m quite happy with the fact that I’ve found a problem with my work that I’m capable of fixing. I have no idea if this is the only problem with what I’ve built so far, I guess I’ll find out soon enough

I’m hoping for a couple of things. The first is that I’ll find my multi-meter. The second is that I’ll find some short somewhere that’s the cause of my problems. Some of the soldering was tight so I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a small short.

As I was writing this, I found out that I may have had my 3PDT switch oriented improperly. This would make a lot of sense because it should have at least worked in the bypass mode. A multimeter would really be nice right about now…