Adventures in Pedal Modding 2: Hitting the First Wall

Adventures in pedal modding 2: hitting the first wall

A while back I thought I’d do a post for fun about my foray into the world of effect pedal modding. The first mod was a success, but in all fairness was a simple capacitor swap to give my Ibanez TS-7 tube screamer some more low-end response. It’s been a while since I’ve updated things beyond that because well, with the next mod I ended up hitting a wall that I’ve been trying different ways around for months.

I found a mod online that was supposed to be a “boiled down Analogue-man silver mod” that only required three component changes. If you’re not familiar with Analogue-man he does pedal upgrades that go up by quality and price. (silver, gold, platinum, etc.) It was a bit more extensive as far as taking the pedal part to get to the boards, but it still should have gone simply enough if I had just been careful…

What you see here is a good example of impatience. I used my solder sucker pen to desolder the component, but didn’t have any braid handy to suck up the last excess bit to easily remove the component. I stupidly tried to persuade it a little bit with pliers and ended up cracking and chipping the board right there, killing the circuit. I looked up some ways to fix the broken pad or jump it to the next solder point but so far all my efforts have been in vain. I once briefly completed the circuit by using a spare piece of wire to connect the broken trace but the signal only stayed for a moment. I gotta say it was a pretty cool moment though because when I tested it I temporarily got this glitchy fuzz that I had certainly never heard out of this pedal before. I still don’t understand how that happened, but oh well.

Since then the circuit has been dead, the pedal gets power, but no sound. Since the pedal was free I can’t say it was a great loss if I don’t get it fixed, although it would have been nice to have around. Lesson learned: if the component doesn’t fall right out, take your time and press some wick on there. Don’t try to push/pull it out!