So today, I decided to sit down and sort out some issues with my latest build - Stealth - that you might have seen in the build reports. This is how it went:
Stealth wasn't 100%. I thought the problem was with the delay initially as it wouldn't pass signal until I poked it the right way, but then I found that there was a lifted/broken trace at the input on the reverb.
That sorted, I still couldn't get the delay working quite right, like, much at all, so I decided to replace it with a Deep Blue Delay on vero and go without the tails of the Small Time. Thinking ahead of myself, I shoved the DBD in without rocking it and .... it didn't work. It passed signal fine, but there was no delay.
I checked all the voltages and found that I was only getting around 6v at each of the effects off the buss you can see in my gut shot. I was getting 9.3 or so at the jack so I bypassed the decoupling but that gave the chorus a wierd noise when engaged, so I decoupled that one and everything is getting around 9v now. The Glam and Smoothie are much happier now.
I was still getting some reverb signal regardless and it turned out that I had the reverb wired to the switch wrong, so it was always on and in the signal. I fixed that (still no delay) and the reverb was sounding quite nice and not over the top - previously it was sounding a bit springy/short delayish early in the pot rotation.
With still no delay, I decided to go back at the Small Time since it had been working with the tap tempo originally out of the box. I rewired it up and got it working. Not sure what the issue was, but this was with no tap, just a normal pot layout. So I jammed with that for a bit and decided to put in back in without the tap.
I put longer leads on the pots and put it back in.
And it didn't work, it just passes a clean signal when on. The reverb now has that short spring thing going on again. It might just be that combination of buffered effects. I really liked it before! I fiddled around with the DBD and it still didn't work.
That's what I did today. I think I'll just get a cave dweller PCB and be done with it.