Klein Bottle WIP

[EBK]

Making good progress on my Klein Bottle kit build.  The process has been quite enjoyable up to this point.

I'm not looking forward to completing all of the potentiometer solder joints though. A few of these would be impossible to solder from the top side of the board without melting some caps.  The closeup pic shows two of these impossible spots.  I figure I'll solder as many pads as I can, then remove the whole assembly and solder the rest from the other side.  I always get nervous tightening nuts on a finished enclosure because I don't always have the correct sockets to minimize the chance of scratching the enclosure.

[tcpoint]

Very nice.  I have one that I'm going to put together, soon.

[EBK]

I've soldered all of the full sized pots with the exception of the two impossible pads that I showed earlier.  Although some others were quite tricky, those two are the only ones that cannot be done from this side of the board (at least by me).  If you're going to build this, and you are using the caps from Peter's Mouser shopping list, I'd recommend leaving that 470nF cap off of the board until that pot is soldered, then bending the leads of the cap so you can solder it from the top of the board. 

I slightly melted one cap in my efforts to get the other spots soldered.  This definitely requires some steady hands and some precise iron placement.

[EBK]

One other thing I've needed to fix on my build is the fact that the powder coat is thick enough on the inside and in the drill holes to leave the enclosure ungrounded if I were to just build it as is.  I chiseled away the coating from the inside of the box around the output jack, and I'm planning on adding an extra washer there to help ensure that the enclosure will be grounded at that point.

[BrianS]

Success to you on that monster.  After looking at the build docs and my not so good success rate with the complicated builds I caved and spent the $350 for a finished one.  Still haven't had time to play with it but the YouTube videos sold me on all the things you can do with it. 

[EBK]

Success to you on that monster.  After looking at the build docs and my not so good success rate with the complicated builds I caved and spent the $350 for a finished one.  Still haven't had time to play with it but the YouTube videos sold me on all the things you can do with it.

I must tell you, $350 for a finished one is a very good bargain. I wouldn't be willing to build one of these for someone else for less than $500.

[BrianS]

Success to you on that monster.  After looking at the build docs and my not so good success rate with the complicated builds I caved and spent the $350 for a finished one.  Still haven't had time to play with it but the YouTube videos sold me on all the things you can do with it.

I must tell you, $350 for a finished one is a very good bargain. I wouldn't be willing to build one of these for someone else for less than $500.

That was another thing I just couldn't get past, the time involved in puttting it together and then just dreading a "No Fire Up."  Troubleshooting is not my forte and the thought of over $200 worth of electronic pieces not functioning just didn't sit well. LOL.  I'm sure you'll blow this out of the water though.  I don't post much on here anymore but I do follow things and you put together some really nice stuff.

[benny_profane]

Glad to see it's coming along well! I had nightmares about those pot solder pads myself. It's doable without melting anything (determination is key), but you have to be a little creative with iron placement. Once I had everything bolted in I wasn't keen on taking it apart again, so I went ahead and soldered from the component side.

[EBK]

That was another thing I just couldn't get past, the time involved in puttting it together and then just dreading a "No Fire Up."  Troubleshooting is not my forte and the thought of over $200 worth of electronic pieces not functioning just didn't sit well. LOL.  I'm sure you'll blow this out of the water though.  I don't post much on here anymore but I do follow things and you put together some really nice stuff.

Thanks!  I seem to produce 2-3 pedals per year, so I do try to make them special.   

I am definitely worried about this pedal not working when I fire it up.  I'm considering tracing my way through the board layout (it's 4 layers!) to find places for my multimeter probes to verify each pot and switch are properly soldered and working.  I really dreaded removing the board to solder those last two pads (I had to bend one of the single-gang pots out of the way too), and I'm sure I'd hate that disassembly process a hundredfold after the jacks and stomps are wired. 

[EBK]

Glad to see it's coming along well! I had nightmares about those pot solder pads myself. It's doable without melting anything (determination is key), but you have to be a little creative with iron placement. Once I had everything bolted in I wasn't keen on taking it apart again, so I went ahead and soldered from the component side.

Maybe my iron tip is wider than the one you use or you had your film cap slightly north of where mine settled in.  My iron would have actually touched the film cap and the electrolytic cap at the same time, regardless of my determination level in my case.  Peter somehow managed to make those connections on the board in his assembly video as well, but I took the long way around and disassembled/reassembled just to be safer.  Ironically, the one cap I melted isn't really that close to one of the difficult solder joints.  It was just the result of an errant movement while inspecting my work.

Edit:  I'm looking at the board layout now, and it seems that the hardest solder joint I made (the one right next to the inductor L1) was for a pad that isn't even connected to anything else in the circuit.  Oh well.

[benny_profane]

Glad to see it's coming along well! I had nightmares about those pot solder pads myself. It's doable without melting anything (determination is key), but you have to be a little creative with iron placement. Once I had everything bolted in I wasn't keen on taking it apart again, so I went ahead and soldered from the component side.

Maybe my iron tip is wider than the one you use or you had your film cap slightly north of where mine settled in.  My iron would have actually touched the film cap and the electrolytic cap at the same time, regardless of my determination level in my case.  Peter somehow managed to make those connections on the board in his assembly video as well, but I took the long way around and disassembled/reassembled just to be safer.  Ironically, the one cap I melted isn't really that close to one of the difficult solder joints.  It was just the result of an errant movement while inspecting my work.

Edit:  I'm looking at the board layout now, and it seems that the hardest solder joint I made (the one right next to the inductor L1) was for a pad that isn't even connected to anything else in the circuit.  Oh well.

That is very ironic that it doesn't connect. I ended up practicing a bunch with a cold iron before committing to the solder. There wasn't much room, but I got it in there. So you're probably right that my tip is a bit more narrow. I also brushed a component and melted a corner nowhere near a tight spot: one of the led trimmers while soldering the 9mm pots. Those were the last onboard components I installed and I think I just got careless. Funny how that works out.

Regardless of method, I'm glad that you ended up getting it finished! This is a huge project! I still have to finish up the offboard wiring on mine.

Edit: Hopefully I didn't come across as glib in re 'determination.' For me, I was thinking, "Well, this has to connect, so I've gotta sort out a way to make it happen." I didn't mean to imply you weren't dedicated or any nonsense like that.

[EBK]

Regardless of method, I'm glad that you ended up getting it finished! This is a huge project! I still have to finish up the offboard wiring on mine.

I still need to do the offboard wiring as well, so I'm not quite done.  I'm just pausing to see if there is a reasonable way to check my work without removing the board again (looks like most of it the pot connections run through the board to the bottoms of caps, unfortunately).

Edit: Hopefully I didn't come across as glib in re 'determination.' For me, I was thinking, "Well, this has to connect, so I've gotta sort out a way to make it happen." I didn't mean to imply you weren't dedicated or any nonsense like that.

Nah, I actually interpreted that in the friendly way that you intended, so all is good.    It didn't even cross my mind that what you said could have been misconstrued as negative until just now.   

[benny_profane]

Regardless of method, I'm glad that you ended up getting it finished! This is a huge project! I still have to finish up the offboard wiring on mine.

I still need to do the offboard wiring as well, so I'm not quite done.  I'm just pausing to see if there is a reasonable way to check my work without removing the board again (looks like most of it the pot connections run through the board to the bottoms of caps, unfortunately).

Edit: Hopefully I didn't come across as glib in re 'determination.' For me, I was thinking, "Well, this has to connect, so I've gotta sort out a way to make it happen." I didn't mean to imply you weren't dedicated or any nonsense like that.

Nah, I actually interpreted that in the friendly way that you intended, so all is good.    It didn't even cross my mind that what you said could have been misconstrued as negative until just now.   

Glad it wasn't misconstrued!

I think the pot connections should be good, so I don't think you'd have to take the board out to check again (although, I have the same worry and that's part of the reason I haven't finished my offboard wiring yet). I was concerned about the smaller pads for resistors. Since it's a massive four-layer board, soldering was slower than usual. I spot checked a bunch of connections with the passives before I installed the pots—everything seemed okay... We'll see though if that is the case.

[EBK]

I've finished up the soldering (I think), it it passed the does-not-'splode-upon-power-up test.  I still have no idea if this thing works yet, but I will start testing it later (I'll put the knobs on before further testing). 


Peter forgot to ship me screws for the enclosure.  The fact that I had plenty laying around due to many past pedal building failures has not helped my confidence.   

[benny_profane]

Looks great! Let us now how it goes when you get it up and running!

Definitely interested to hear how people end up using this. So many opportunities to open up time/modulation effects and create interesting textures with multi-band frequency arrangements.

Or, you know, you could get a bunch of rats and have the rats go through the other rats and create the king rat.