Shrunken Blue Warbler (not for the faint of heart)

[midwayfair]

Oh man. Not an easy build. I was home sick today with a really horrible sore throat, so I got to paint this a little early, but there was a lot of trouble shooting.

My drilling on the box to accommodate the DPDT put the knobs really close together, and I'm still learning exactly where to drill the tiny DC jacks for side mounting (every build I've done with them like that so far has had an issue of some sort -- usually boiling down to me forgetting it has a nut inside that is bigger than the hole). I found a serious error in my mini layout that I had to correct pretty early on, then I forgot an on-board ground connection that killed everything south of the audio path, then when I fixed that I made a solder bridge on the 9V at the IC that took me a bit to find, then there's the crappy switch soldering ... the wiring's a little neater than it looks (there are, after all, 5 wires coming off the board and a sixth attached to the LED). Finally, after everything was done and I had actually started clear coating, I noticed that the in jack was a little loose. I poked at it and suddenly it was VERY loose. Removed the nut and ... the threads were stripped. Which meant replacing a jack after the entire thing was boxed up. (Luckily it was the in jack and the board was small enough not to be in the way. The out jack would have been much harder to get to.)

I also learned some bad news. The vactrol apparently MUST be a VTL5C1 to get tremolo. I'm still trying to figure out why that should be -- after all, it's just a series resistor, and I've used an NSL-32 in the Shoot the Moon to excellent effect, which does tremolo essentially the same way. It wasn't just that the effect was milder. It's that there wasn't any tremolo AT ALL without the 5C1. Maybe I was just doing something wrong when I was testing other things this time around, but for now I'm going to suggest, if anyone else is planning on building this, to be prepared to desolder if you're trying to use anything other than the VTL5C1.

Anyway, here's the finished pedal, which I'm pretty pleased with in the end despite all the trouble. I went for a truly shrunken version of my first one -- nearly identical art, similar control layout (though the rate is on the opposite side to make room for the DC jack, and I couldn't do the nifty dots because there wasn't enough room around the control this time), and an anodized blue finish. It's almost definitely going on the mandolin board.




I've also revised my mini layout to make fitting the vactrol and polarity protection diode easier next time (though I might need time to forget the trauma). You can see in the pictures that it's kind of hugging one of the tants and the leads are tucked under. The new layout has enough space to avoid that. http://www.madbeanpedals.com/forum/index.php?topic=6628.0

[culturejam]

I'll bet you see the inside of a 125B and don't know what to do with yourself. 

Nice work, man.

[pickdropper]

Yeah, that's a really nice build, Jon.  Tight fit in there.  Cool paint job as well.

[hammerheadmusicman]

Well, you;ve done it again Jon, Everytime i see one of your builds, i think i should order some more 1590a box's immediatley!

George

[midwayfair]

Thanks guys.

[gtr2]

Sweet!  It matches something I have 

Josh

[nzCdog]

Get well soon!  Build looks awesome