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Appreciate it, thanks!

I thought I had one of these on hand, but I guess not. For Q1 on the wavelord, can i just use a 2n5458 jfet? It's just an input buffer, right?

Is there another common jfet that would make more sense there? Cheers.

Removed the 4558, and I'm getting some really strange readings on the 1044 now. pin 1 is starting at the right voltage, and then counting down for example.

I'm going to pull the 1044 as well and replace that.

I would think of them as problematic, lol. I thought at first it might have been a bad/wrong zener, but i stuck a new 4742 in and it didn't help anything.

4558
1 - 0, 2 - 0.37, 3 - 7.49, 4 - 1.35, 5 - 7.48, 6 - 7.51, 7 - 7.51, 8 - 16.35

1044
1 - 7.83, 2 - 12.7, 3 - 17.28, 4 - 17.28, 5 - 17.28, 6 - 11.97, 7 - 9.68, 8 - 8.09

I've checked all the cap values and confirmed they're correct, the solder looks fine at the top of d1/d2 even though it looks like crap in the pics (bad lighting), I can't figure out why I'm having trouble with such a simple build but maybe a fresh set of eyes will help. i get a booming, muddy distortion and the pots don't change anything at all.

Nevermind, problem solved! All I had to do was go against everything I've learned so far and ignore what the boards say, just connect everything going left to right and leave the leftovers empty. This thing rocks.

This might be helpful info as well.

On the SPS board, the holes are: 9v IN BU -V GD +V OU HI FS LO. I left the 9v and HI unconnected.

On the Merman, they are BLANK IN BU -V GD +V OU LO FS. I left BLANK unconnected, and connected LO and FS to their corresponding pads on the SPS.

Hi All, thanks in advance for any help on this. I got a couple of SPS boards direct from VFE, I finally got the Merman all populated and wired it up to his SPS i/o power module, and...this is weird, I get an un affected signal when the effect is engaged (no effect and the pots change nothing), with true bypass switched on. Not just the output either, I used an audio probe and I'm getting unaffected sound through the circuit, so I'm really stumped here.

If I turn on the buffer, silence. Regardless of buffer position, I get nothing when the circuit isn't switched on. He sent me ribbon wire to use between the effect and switching board, but the indicators on the solder pads do not match up, so I used separate wires to match them up to their counterparts. I've included his diagrams for clarity (had to take pics of these, they're too big to attach here).

Let me know if anything jumps out, I'm thinking there must be something wrong between the board and switching board, or on the switching board itself, since the buffer doesn't seem to be working at all.

Just PM'd you about the offer, I really appreciate it, super generous of you. The process has been frustrating enough that I've been just foregoing the gloss layer after multiple attempts on each design and sometimes spraying a clearcoat on them at home.

Hmmm. I ungroup everything excessively once I'm happy with how it looks, so I can't see how that would be the problem unless I need to separately ungroup everything in the images that I import before incorporating them into the design. I'll try that later.

I think the latter point is the more likely culprit, but if I'm doing ctrl+a before changing a layer to RDG_GLOSS, wouldn't that get every element, regardless of whether it's a fill or trace?

I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong on my gloss layer, wondering if anyone else has encountered this. Tayda keeps rejecting my pdfs with a note that says "Your artwork has severe issues. Please contact us using Help Desk section in your Tayda Electronics account."

When I opened a help ticket, here was the response:

Hello,
I looked at our internal notes, it says, your gloss layer, some parts are painted with rdg_gloss but some parts are not, they are just blue but not painted with actual rdg_gloss.Thanks,Hugo

I'm using Inkscape to do the initial layout following the tutorials here, then in Affinity - yeah, I know Hugo doesn't like AF but I don't want to subscribe to Adobe - I'm selecting everything and applying RDG_GLOSS. I've gone back into my Inkscape and made sure that every single element is ungrouped and vectorized, so I'm not understanding how it's possible that some of the items in my gloss layer are the right color swatch, and some are just blue.

Wow. I appreciate that so much, Brian.

Guess I'll be placing another order for something soon when the next batch drops, those VFEs are super fun and challenging.

Thanks all. Gonna wait and see if I can just get a replacement, if not I'm pretty confident I can jump the shredded ones where they're supposed to go.

Totally understand about the production boards, I didn't mean to even imply that as a possibility. I'd sooner order another full one and just pull the switching board off it. That would be awesome if you have a proto board available, if not I'm thinking I can jump the corner pin on one to the second nearest hole because I can see that I also ripped part of the trace up, and otherwise be maybe ok.

I emailed MB about this but then realized that was probably annoying, since the forums are here for the purpose of support and he likely doesn't have a replacement since it comes attached to the effect board. I put together the Mysterioso (blackstone mosfet) and when I solder the footswitches in, I missed the bit in the instructions about how they should be facing each other instead of straight up like normal. Managed to get them out with some braid, a sucker and some patience, but I still pulled off a few of the solder pads from the underside. Pics attached, are the remaining pads on top enough to keep this functional? I can see that I may want to jump one of the switch pins, which doesn't look too hard.