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Pretty much a year ago my Snarling Dogs Mold Spore kind of died. The wah still worked and both LEDs in the dogs eyes still lit up when activated, but the ring mod side would kill all sound coming out of the pedal.

It was a sad day as this is my fave fun mental pedal for just sheer noise making and lol moments.

When this happened I had never made myself a pedal, so in the in between timeframe I have made myself a Madbean Karate Shop and a Tremulus Lune clone, both of which worked!
So decided to to look into fixing the mold spore, so by asking around and reading a lot of info here, it would seem the max1044 IC would be the most likely culprit.
They are known to be a weak spot, so started looking for a suitable replacement but a more improved IC solution. No point in replacing a weak componet with the same weak item.

It was suggested to try a TC1044 as a replacement but when I eventually got around to look to buy one they were hard to get hold of without a major minimum buy threshold. Then after an outbust on twitter the chap from North Effects (UK builder) suggested an easily available IC L7660SCPA - it should be the same and work ok. (Mike from MadeByMike also mentioned a 7660 as a replacement ages ago when I asked him about troubleshooting/fixing it)

So last night, I had all the bits and set about with a de-solder pump, wix (first timer de soldered stuff from PCB) and got the max1044 off the board.
Soldered in a DIL socket, just in case and for future swaps if needed. Popped in the L7660SCPA and put it all back together.
Plugged it in and held my breath...

And it worked!!

This was around midnight, so couldn't really blast stuff out. Just used my kids tiny practice amp and some headphones to test. but all is good again 

Are rainbow LEDs more hassle than what they are worth gimmick wise?
Are they more fragile than your average straight forward single colour LED?

Only ask as I thought it would be a good idea to put in the Tremulus Lune I just built. It works fine for a while happily pulsing and flashing in time whilst changing colour. Then after a while it stops emitting. The effect still works fine, just nothing from the LED until power is completely disconnected and then reconnected.

Might just stick a redone in there and be done wit it.

How would I go about adding in a "true bypass" toggle switch to the buffered version of the Karate chop I built?

I like it as a buffered pedal as per the original Systech, but I would really like to try it out in front of some grumpy Fuzz pedals of mine that don't like buffers, without doing any re soldering to permanent true bypass.

I've seen this done on other pedals but no idea how to wire it up.

My 2nd pedal build.. well 3rd if you include the feedback/loop pedal I made first.

It's a Musikding.de Tremulus Lune kit and I substituted the stock red LED for a rainbow LED seeing as the LED reacts to the LFO.





It worked well for about an hour, now it's gone all intermittent on me. Signal still passes but no effect and no life in the LED when it does this 

I've been after a "Harmonic Energizer" clone type thing for a while but there are not many about without the extra Fuzz circuits added in.
So much like many peeps on this site that have built their own pedals, I set about building my first pedal.

I thought I'd cheat a bit and get a PCB and found one here on this site. I will go all hardcore and veroboard on next pedal build  :lol:
Took around four hours I think, in between school runs, making cups of tea and a trip to McDs for lunch.


Things learn't.. solder leads on the board/PCB first, not to the pots and jacks/switch, makes life easier when nearly complete and a neater install.

The rather fitting 70s colour scheme was a total accident. I had ordered a yellow LED as none of the pedals I have, have a yellow LED and brown knobs as I quite fancied something different.
Case was meant to be red Hammerite (smooth) as I have enough of that stuff to paint a cruise liner for one reason or another, then I found the can of Metallic Copper Shiny Spray at the back of the shed and used that instead and came up with this:



Best thing about it is it worked first bloody time!! So no gut shots as I'm not taking it apart incase it never works again although do need to sort out proper labeling etc so it may come apart sometime soon. May even redo it completely but the copper/brown is growing on me.

Only really tested it with my dirt pedals, some its better in front of, others behind. One supprise was it works really well with a Green Ringer. Like I said it works fine but depending on wher eit is in the chain you can sometimes hear a big "pop" when it's turned on /off.




All this..


into this..


Made the mistake of buying a DPDT switch instead of a 3 way one, so made up the "Buffered" version.
Not so clever soldering leads on this way first, should have done PCB end first.