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Lowrider - weird sounds

Started by AlleMux, April 15, 2013, 05:46:24 PM

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AlleMux

Hello to everyone!
I found myself stuck in a very frustrating situation that I'm not able to explain!

this morning I finished to give life to my own Lowrider: everything was fine, I plugged my guitar in and it sounded great!
I left C12 off, and used a 1n capacitor instead of 10n for C10, as suggested by the .pdf project, so maybe that's why the upper octave sounded a bit fuzzy, but when the pot of the upper octave was all turned down the sound was perfectly clean, so everything was ok.
Well, I enjoyed playing my stompbox for several minutes and I was very happy about how it sounded.

This afternoon, when I returned home, I turn it on again and...there was no sound at all!

When the pedal is turned off, the true bypass works perfectly. But when i turned it on, I can hear just some scratches, and some weird sounds, and no guitar signal at all. After I tried to open the box in order to find out if there were some bad connection, I didn't notice anything strange, any part unconnected, or any weak connection. Then I tried again to play something, and this time I could hear my guitar signal distorted and with no octave.

I built a couple of stompboxes before, just following the instruction, and they all worked great. But I have to say that I'm not an expert in electrical engineering and I have no idea about what I can do.

Does anybody have any idea of what the problem could be?

Thanks for your time,

Alle, Sassuolo, ITALY

jimilee

Check the input on the stomp. Reflow that. I've run into this a couple of times.
Pedal building is like the opposite of sex.  All the fun stuff happens before you get in the box.

billstein

This just happened to me in the last couple days with a Cosmopolitan. Had played it a few times and everything was great, plugged it in two days ago and nothing. I reflowed the solder and it fired right up. Must have been a bad joint that lost contact when being moved around.

AlleMux

I noticed that one of the pin of the 3PDT switch (the one that brings the input wire to the pcb) moves a bit if you touch it!
I'm afraid I've blown it up while I was soldering...

As soon as possible I'll try to replace the whole 3PDT with a new one, then I'll let you know if it will work again.

AlleMux

I replaced the 3PDT with a new one.
Now, when the pedal is turned on, I can actually hear the sound of my guitar, but it's dirty, distorted and there's no octave.

How do you test if there are some ICs or some transistor that need to be replaced?