Merman build

[madbean]

I ran into a couple issues on this build.

- When I first tested the built board I had lots of sputter. It sounded misbiased. A quick voltage check confirmed that the VB rail was reading 260mV. I knew my soldering was good so I suspected a dodgy component. I took out the first 47k on the VB voltage divider and started testing. Turns out there was continuity between things that there should not be. So, I was faced with the prospect of doing some desoldering or building a new board. I decided to desolder the 16mm pots and check my work.

After studying the PCB traces on the Eagle brd file I made a guess to where the problem might be - a little via next to pins 3 and 4 of IC1. And, I guessed lucky cause that was the problem - there was a micro bridge somewhere in that area. After running an Xacto carefully around that via I was able to get my VB voltage where it was supposed to be. All in all, it was a couple hours worth of debugging.

(PS not to worry - it's not a board fault as far as I can tell. I checked all the other Merman PCBs with my continuity checker after this and they all came back clean. Pretty sure it was a little hair of steel wool).

- Second issue was I apparently over-sprayed the shit out of the clear coat on my faceplate. So, it's got some texture. But, I kinda like the way it looks.

- Also, I decided to try non-mounted jacks on this build. It turned out to be pretty easy, actually.

I like the Merman - I think splitting the clean and drive pots was a fun idea and useful as well. Mostly, I prefer the Klon for clean settings and the Bottom control really makes the clean boost setting sound huge.

[matmosphere]

Nice! The overspray actually gives it a nice ocean kinda touch.

[Ralfg]

Damn debugging skills to the next level!

I like ripples. It totally fits. It reminds me of a time when my roommate back in the day had just clear coated a painting and I had to move it to a different location while it was drying. I did not realize the this was where the condensation from crappy swamp cooler collected and it totally got a ripple effect too. Fortunately the painting was looking into the window of a restaurant, and he ended up loving the result. Happy accidents.

[gordo]

I like that.  The tough part would be duplicating it.