Current Lover no signal

[wakejyles]

Hey all!

I just finished putting together the Current Lover and am not getting any signal when the pedal is on. I've got it set to run at 18v with a 3007 chip. The LED stays on all the time, but gets a little bit brighter when the pedal is engaged. I took it out of the box since I thought maybe there was a short somewhere, but testing it unboxed still produced the same results.

I've also started taking an audio probe to it, and as far as I can tell most of the resistors towards the beginning of the circuit seem to be passing audio just fine. I'm also getting audio into and out of the BBD and am able to hear it modulating and changing when I move the rate, manual and feedback knobs in different positions, so I don't think the issue is in the chip itself. My guess is that it might be something power related, but I'm not really sure where to look or where to go from here at this point, so any help would be greatly appreciated!!

I've attached a couple pictures of the board in the google folder below.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1SGt9pc9nhamOFJcnJnCFFCxq1luBbkc2?usp=drive_link

[wakejyles]

Quick update:

I can hear it doing all the modulating on the resistors in the modulation section, and then the signal stops once I get to r21. I just tested the voltages and a few of the chips are off, so here are the readings:

IC2 Pin 2 and 6 go back and forth between 10.3-13ish. Tey should be be right around 7v.

IC4 pins 12 and 13 are both around 1.6-2ish when they should be around 6.7v.

IC5 pin 6 is 4-6.8v when it should be 14.8.

Q2 I'm getting swapped readings for the collector and emitter pins. So the Emitter is reading 14.2 and the collector is reading something else (forgot to write it down but it's listed as "varies" in the BOM). I tried flipping Q2 around but that didn't seem to make a difference, still not getting any signal out of it.

I also noticed that the BOM has r20 listed as 470R but on the schem its listed as 100R. I swapped it out to 100R but that also didn't do anything noticeably different.

[wakejyles]

Final update since I don't know how to delete a post: I traced the modulated audio signal to r21, which is where it stopped. I swapped out c14 to see if that made a difference and took r21 out of the circuit entirely. That seemed to fix the LED always on issue for some reason, but I still wasn't getting any signal. I noticed that signal went into one leg of the cap at c14 but didn't come out the other, so I pulled that leg from the circuit and took the probe to it directly and was able to get a signal.

Ran a wire from that leg to the output section of the switch and it's good to go!

[jimilee]

Final update since I don't know how to delete a post: I traced the modulated audio signal to r21, which is where it stopped. I swapped out c14 to see if that made a difference and took r21 out of the circuit entirely. That seemed to fix the LED always on issue for some reason, but I still wasn't getting any signal. I noticed that signal went into one leg of the cap at c14 but didn't come out the other, so I pulled that leg from the circuit and took the probe to it directly and was able to get a signal.

Ran a wire from that leg to the output section of the switch and it's good to go!

Nice job! We will leave the post up just in case someone runs into something similar.  Did you or can you, with your DMM, check continuity between c14 on the outpad?


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