This thing had a replaced footswitch, replaced battery connectors (set up for 9v), the jack sockets had been rewired and flipped around (but fortunately retaining the original wire), and obviously the enclosure got machine-gunned in all kinds of unimaginable ways. The icing on the cake, of course, was that despite the seller's claim that the pedal worked fine, it quite clearly didn't because it was lacking that secret mega-fuzz sound that comes from the last fraction of the volume control. It's a classic case of a vintage pedal that more or less does what it says on the tin, but unless you know exactly what it's supposed to do (and/or have a reference pedal), you won't know that it's broken. I probed around and found that Q2's emitter bypass cap was dead.
Here are the 'before' pics:
I did the following things:
- Dismantled all the bits that needed rewiring and cleaned up the jack sockets
- Cleaned up my last of the vintage donor Arrow DPDT switches that I wanted to use here
- Hooked it all up again (I wanted to reuse the vintage wiring and this required routing it under the board because after various generations of rewiring, there wasn't much slack)
- Stitched up some PP3 connectors and a 'link' cable to get the pedal running at 18v again (NB: I opted for the split positive/negative wires because this particular Power Boost would have come with PP4 snaps originally)
First, I bravely soldered a multi-layer ceramic SMD cap between Q2E's 470R and the adjacent pad which happens to be ground (and thus runs parallel to the dead cap). I tinned the pads on the cap, and then I used some flux to kinda reinvigorate the two ancient solder joints that I was going to use. Then I held the SMD cap in place with a pokey-tool and simply reflowed the two joints to get it stuck in there. First time doing something like this so I wasn't expecting a great success but it worked
Then, in order to avoid any potential (future) issues where the original 22uF cap might start leaking DC, I desoldered one of the leads, emptied out the joint of all the residual solder, and then gently positioned the cap back into place. The original cap is now kinda suspended in place by the remaining original solder joint, but it's no longer in circuit, and so it's an invisible fix.
Anyway, here are the 'after' pics:
The philosophy here was that I didn't want to do anything to this pedal that couldn't be undone (or done better) in the future. I needed to get rid of the previous owner's recent fuckery, and I needed to get the pedal working properly, but at the same time I didn't want to do any needless destruction where it could be avoided.
I thought for a while about filling the various holes, but that's also something I've never done before, and I'm also nowhere near confident enough to be able to retouch the paintwork such that the fix is invisible. That might be a job for the future.
Anyway, thanks for reading
(and thanks to Electric Warrior for spotting the bargain when it came up for sale, and for relaying it over to me!)
