Yes, another Honeydripper issue

[iipeacefrog]

Hey guys! Have a few successful builds under my built but I'm having trouble getting the HoneyDripper fully operational. Here's where I'm at:

The pedal half works; the fuzz circuit seems to work fine and increases in nastiness as I turn up the pot; The rotary switch also seems to be switching vowel sounds. When I turn the rotary switch, I hear an initial vowel but then the envelope never resets, and the pedal ends up sounding like a stuck wah pedal. The sweep knob also seemingly does nothing. I've reset all of the IC's, double checked all of my solder joints, triple checked my wiring and can't really figure out what might be going on. The only thing I can think that may be causing issues is that I switched some of the polarized caps with non-polarized equivalents, but in 99% of cases that should be fine...any suggestions?

[iipeacefrog]

Anybody?

[reddesert]

I've never built a Honeydripper, but what you're describing sounds like an envelope detector that gets "stuck." It detects the first volume increase when you strike the strings and sweeps the filter, so you hear the vowel, but then it never resets to zero.  The fact that it works after you turn the switch makes me wonder if some capacitor that gets charged up is never discharging until you turn the switch, or perhaps some op-amp is locked up (pegged against a voltage rail) and unlocks when the switch is turned.

You should check the voltages on all the ICs against the voltages in the build document. I would record all the voltages when the pedal is powered on, then play until it gets into the stuck state, and record the voltages again.

The envelope section of the Honeydripper is basically the middle section of the schematic, from the sweep pot through IC2C-D, IC3A-D, to pins 1 and 16 of the LM13700.  This is pretty complex as envelope detectors go, so it will be hard to find the fault without detailed voltages.