Karate Shop Mods/Issues For Victory Winning

[hrlz]

first time poster here. some background, my name is harley and i live in south mississippi, byeah. (pronounced like 'yeah' but with an added 'b' in front, i use this word a lot for a grown man)
i first heard about the SHE in a les claypool interview about the bass sound on 'john the fisherman' and 'making plans for nigel'. as a primus fan and bass player i was more than intrigued and tried fruitlessly to duplicate this sound to no avail. it would be years before it was an object of attainability rather than a fairytale available only to the rich. suddenly a plethora of companies and diy'ers started cranking them out, by this time i had decided it wasnt important enough to pay the asking price. years go by and i get into electronics, i discover madbeanpedals.com and brian eventually added the pcb among the other awesome projects on this site. just a week ago i purchased pcbs for the karate shop and the nautilus. im tackling the simpler one first as i want to 'develop' it more so than the nautilus. SO i have some questions/insights that have proven themselves so important to our community as the progressive tools of collaborative inquisition.
HERE WE GO.....

THE EXPRESSION PEDAL DILEMMA: switching isolation jacks, series resistors, varying potentiometer values from exp pedal to exp pedal.....these things seem joined to this problem whether its this pedal build or any other. ive been doing things a bit differently and i dont see anybody talking about it the forums. this is my first post in ANY of the diy electronics forums for pedal builders. what ive found to be most flexible is using an old crybaby enclosure, gcb95 to be exact. easily obtained and cheap. remove the circuit board to build a sweet filter with later (maybe in another topic comrades). leave the knob in there. get a cheap pcb from radioshack or use a small piece of leftover vero or perf board (NOTE: i dont use either of these things, i dont know why, it just hasnt happened yet, i always use the ones from radio shack with the copper traces built right in.) and an led, a ldr/photocell/cadmium sulfide resistor, a plastic 1/4" jack (switching optional) and we take all these things and build a foot controller pedal that takes voltage from an adapter or 9-volt and makes the led brighter with the toe down. we position the led/ldr so that they face one another (vactrol) and attach the ldr leads to the two outside legs of the plastic jack. bam: expression pedal. next we attach the outside legs of the potentiometer inside the pedal to the outside legs of another isolation/plastic jack in/on the pedal. run a cable between the two and there you go. some pedals are only usable in this fashion set at 12 o'clock but others reserve the functionality of the pedals knob as a foot sweep governor. ive had good results with this. AND if you use sockets you can switch the ldr and led out to find the best mix. adding a switch can reverse the sweep (led lights with heel down) and you could run one exp pedal to multiple effects units. lets get a bit nuttier....what if we put in a strobe circuit (available at radioshack for $5/$7, cant remember) and the sweep of the pedal controls speed switchable from led brightness, tack on a bunch of extra jacks and ldr's and youve got a very flexible and fun foot controller. whew. i look forward to the responses, results, and criticisms this idea will attract. hope it helps.

TRUE BYPASS/BUFFERED???: in this thread http://www.madbeanpedals.com/forum/index.php?topic=3289.0
the builder adds a toggle to switch between the two. i have some inquiries...
1) why are pedals one or the other?
2) whats the point of switching between them? or is it just to see the tonal difference/preference?
3) does anybody know offhand how to wire this toggle up? im sure i could figure it but my brain does twist a bit at the thought of this looking at the two wiring diagrams on the pdf. thanks.

OUTPUT CAP: so i see somebody was suggesting a 1.5uf for the output cap. which one is the output cap? im assuming its c7 because its right before the output but c2 is in line with the 'buffer' tab represented adjacent to the output and my overthinking brain needs verification that it is merely for the sake of size in regards to the schematic. also why a dramatic change from the 100n to the 1.5uf?

FREQUENCY CAP CHANGE: in a wah pedal you can change/add caps that determine the peak frequency at the ends of the sweep, as the karate shop is kind of fixed wah pedal could this be done here? im looking at c8, c9, and c10 as candidates for this procedure. or is this practically pointless? i planned on socketing c8 at the least to see. any thoughts suggestions?

VOLTAGE DROP???: whats up with the potential voltage drop and why would it need to be circumvented? does it regard the proper bias of trannys and op amps? why not just suggest d1 be the diode that wont lead to it? unless it would have other undesirable effects?


THANKS COMRADES!


tl;dr    look up norbert weiner. you wont regret it.

[rps-10]

TRUE BYPASS/BUFFERED???: in this thread http://www.madbeanpedals.com/forum/index.php?topic=3289.0
the builder adds a toggle to switch between the two. i have some inquiries...
1) why are pedals one or the other?
2) whats the point of switching between them? or is it just to see the tonal difference/preference?
3) does anybody know offhand how to wire this toggle up? im sure i could figure it but my brain does twist a bit at the thought of this looking at the two wiring diagrams on the pdf. thanks.

I see you found my evolution thread on this circuit 
1) builders preference I guess (no idea really)
2) I put the switch in after seeing another builder do it to one of their pedals. As I have a really awkward Fuzz pedal that does not like buffered pedals in front of it and I wanted to try out this pedal before it to see how it sounded in the chain.
3) It's linked in that of mine thread: http://www.madbeanpedals.com/forum/index.php?topic=5238.0

[hrlz]

alright. the thing about the fuzz makes sense for the switch. a few days after i posted i went laboriously into the manufacture of my karate shop and love the end result. the only thing i have to complain about is the pots being so close together that you cannot use the standard 'skirted hex knobs' (dont know what theyre called offhand but ill post pics later.) you have to use mini's. no biggie, it still sounds great.
thanks for your reply/info.
hrlz