Dead or Alive?
Let me start this whining by saying that the customer was right. I messed up.
A while back I bought this Madbean Mangler board to try out their negative-ground Fuzz Face circuit. It makes for a Fuzz Face that isn't picky about 9-volt adapters and that's nice. I'd kind of tossed it aside and I finally decided to stick it in an enclosure and sell it to get it out of here. I had an enclosure I'd drilled for a single-knob Rangemaster circuit that I ended up not liking, so I drilled a second hole, but the holes aren't exactly spaced perfectly. So I was only asking $50 for the pedal. And I said in the description that it was some spare parts I'd thrown together to make more room in my work area.
So the buyer gets the pedal and says the 9-volt jack is dead and the pedal just screeched when he was trying to play through it. And I immediately knew what was wrong. The PCBs in these little PCB builds move around some and it had grounded out against the back of the pots. I suggested that he cut a piece of cardboard the same size as the PCB and slip it between the PCB and the pots, but he had no interest in fixing the problem, so I took the pedal back.
I opened it up today, moved the board around until it wasn't touching the pots anymore and it magically came back to life.
I never think of protecting the back of the pots because I don't usually do PCB builds and that isn't on my mind. But here's the way the kids do it these days, for anyone who might be curious. "Pot Condoms" that slip on over the back of the pot. Keeps the pot from grounding out on the back of the board. Ten seconds to do the job right, but I'm a dinosaur and that job never actually occurred to me.
Dead or Alive?
Let me start this whining by saying that the customer was right. I messed up.
A while back I bought this Madbean Mangler board to try out their negative-ground Fuzz Face circuit. It makes for a Fuzz Face that isn't picky about 9-volt adapters and that's nice. I'd kind of tossed it aside and I finally decided to stick it in an enclosure and sell it to get it out of here. I had an enclosure I'd drilled for a single-knob Rangemaster circuit that I ended up not liking, so I drilled a second hole, but the holes aren't exactly spaced perfectly. So I was only asking $50 for the pedal. And I said in the description that it was some spare parts I'd thrown together to make more room in my work area.
So the buyer gets the pedal and says the 9-volt jack is dead and the pedal just screeched when he was trying to play through it. And I immediately knew what was wrong. The PCBs in these little PCB builds move around some and it had grounded out against the back of the pots. I suggested that he cut a piece of cardboard the same size as the PCB and slip it between the PCB and the pots, but he had no interest in fixing the problem, so I took the pedal back.
I opened it up today, moved the board around until it wasn't touching the pots anymore and it magically came back to life.
I never think of protecting the back of the pots because I don't usually do PCB builds and that isn't on my mind. But here's the way the kids do it these days, for anyone who might be curious. "Pot Condoms" that slip on over the back of the pot. Keeps the pot from grounding out on the back of the board. Ten seconds to do the job right, but I'm a dinosaur and that job never actually occurred to me.