Build Your Own Clone Message Board

I attempted the Confidence Boost kit last night and failed with flying colors. When I finished, I plugged everything in and only got noise and crackles. But, the noise and crackles got louder and softer when I turned the trim pot. After looking through the troubleshooting thread, I realized that I installed the op amp in the wrong direction. I couldn't get enough solder out with the braid to remove it. I lost a couple prongs during the removal. I tried to just "make it work". When I plugged everything back up, I could hear my guitar for about 10 secs before it went back to crackles and noise.

Either way, I feel semi-good about my first attempt. I am going to try the tremolo kit next.

If you installed the op-amp backwards it's highly likely that it's toast now. Installing a dual op-amp backwards reverses the +9V and ground pins which in turn fries the op-amp.

I would strongly recommend that you do NOT proceed to the Tremolo kit until you get the CB working correctly. Post some high quality and IN FOCUS photos (blurry photos are useless) of your CB build so we can take a look at the quality of your soldering. Having good soldering skills is a MUST if you want to have a working pedal when you are done.

Here are some pics of my build.

https://www.dropbox.com/gallery/861884/2/Public/byoc-cb?h=7cdf66

The solder 'joints' that you show in your pictures to the input jack are really, really bad. You need to get much more heat to the jack terminals to get the solder to flow out and alloy with the surface of those tags. You might be better off starting again on those joints - remove the wires and clean up the tags with a very fine file or glass fibre pencil. Then re-solder.

Yes, the soldering of the jacks is pretty bad. The soldering of the op-amp looks suspect as well. You need to cut off the excess lead sticking thru the PCB too. These are short circuit risks. They need to be cut off at the top of the solder joint.