Build Your Own Clone Message Board

Hey guys,

Just bought a new Confidence Booster, and have been putting it together like mad for the past two days (my very first time with a PCB and soldering iron! ). After I finished soldering the last wire, I ran it over to my amp and plugged it in. To my dismay, no sound came out. So I hopped on to the forum, and saw I made two mistakes. I soldered the (brown-black-black-orange-brown) resistor in the 4th slot, and the (brown-black-black-red-brown) resistor in the 6th slot. In simpler words, I soldered the 10k into the 100k slot, and the 100k in the 10k slot. My second mistake was wiring stereo for out and mono for in. So I switched those as well. I took it back to amp, and this time I was getting a weird fizzing noise that seemed to be affected by the guitar. Ok, this is a step forward. After messing with it a bit, I found out that if I pressed down on the transistor joints and a few others (marked below), the sound would clean up and sound just great. If it helps, I broke the stock 2N3904, so I had to go buy one at Radioshack. All help is appreciated!

P.S. After I found the "pressing trick", I reflowed the joints, still same thing.

Well it looks pretty good,a couple of things,your wires for your jacks have way too much bare wire,and could cause a short,but if you can push down on the solder joints,go back a reflow the solder on those joints. Also it's hard to tell on the topside of the pcb,but make sure there are no solder bridges there too.

Apart from the 'first time builder' build quality I would not be surprised if you picked up all sorts of weird noises if you run this naked (the CF that is, not yourself ). Any guitar effect circuit needs to be mounted inside a grounded metal enclosure to stop pick up of ambient electromagnetic radiation (hum, buzz, radio transmissions, EM radiation from computers etc.)

It may seem strange but when you touch such circuits you can either end up injecting a lot of 60Hz hum, or your body can act as a grounded shield and reduce EM pick up. Such as when you touch the (grounded) strings on a guitar.