Matts Ramblings

My brothers birthday is coming up, after a bit of deliberation, I decided that I’d use my shiny new soldering iron and build him a reverb pedal from BYOC (http://www.buildyourownclone.com/).

This is quite an undertaking, the last time I tried to solder anything, the result was, shall we say, less than satisfactory. But, onwards I pressed!  The Kit itself comes with a rather awesome metal box, and the required bits n bobs and a nicely marked out PCB.

I quickly got the surface mount components on the board over about 3 hours, spent two hours unsoldering two components (a diode was back to front, and a capacitor was in the wrong spot!). Then I had a shocking realisation, It wasnt going to fit in the box!.

The belleton “brick” unit solders to the backside of the PCB, and I hadn’t trimmed the stems from the mounted components low enough to get a flush fit!. So, I had to desolder the brick, trim the legs, and re-solder the brick back on. Somewhere in this process, I managed to do a bit of damage to a few components. oops!

So, now, it works, but I have a lot of hum. I’m guessing that one of the capacitors I damaged is fried!. So ill have to replace that, but It’s been a rather awesome learning process, hopefully ill have it working soon. I’m definitely a lot more confident about my soldering(and desoldering!) ability now!