Fuzz Face build trouble shoot

[mrsquarewave]

Hi mates new guy here

Hope I can get some advice to help me trouble shoot a FF build, I'm kind of painting by numbers here copying the layout of an Ivor by Dustin Francis (vintage ff clone) as my guide.

Its a freaken mess at the moment so Im too embarrassed to show it to you just yet and I've very rudimentary understanding of electronics so sorry in advance for stupid questions.

So, after carefully going over the wiring I'm almost 100 percent that it's wired up right, when I plug in i get signal into my amp but seeming nothing when I click it on. If i turn my amp up loud there is a bit of crunchy signal coming through (not good crunch). I checked an trouble shooting vid with the same issue but the fix of the pots wired around the wrong way is not the problem.

Any help would be appreciated


Andrew

[11-90-an]

hi and welcome to da foroom...

don't be scared to show us your build.. for all we know your soldering  is better than mine... !

so pictures please? front and back

also, does your ff happen to be a positive ground...?

can we have voltage readings too? you can read the "debugging: what to do when it doesn't work" theead at the top of the building your own stompboxes webpage, i guess

[duck_arse]

also welcome, also we need to see the wiring of your jacks and footswitch.

[mrsquarewave]

Thank you for your replies and the welcome to the forum.

Im going for a silicone ff build so I guess that its a positive ground.

Such is my newness to the world of pedal building (and electronics for that matter) I have to look up just about every thing (neg and pas ground for example).

Ive added pics board and build in general and you can see my shameful rats nest in all its glory.

Oh, and cheers for pointing me to the pinned post

Many thanks

Andrew

[willienillie]

Negative ground/positive ground is a function of NPN/PNP transistors, not Ge/Si.  It looks like you've wired positive ground (hard to be sure, the pics are kinda small)*.  If your silicon tansistors are NPN (likely), you need to swap the wires from your battery snap, to make negative ground.

Edit:  I forgot to mention that the electrolytic caps will need to conform to the polarity of your power.  If your transistors are indeed NPN and you switch to negative ground, then the positive ends of those two caps will need to go to Q1 base and Fuzz pot wiper.  I think that is how you have them now.  Hopefully they weren't damaged by the power being reversed before, but it's possible they were.

Edit #2:  It looks like your resistors are mixed up a little.  You have a 33K where there would normally be a 330, and a 1.2K (?) where there would normally be a 33K.  Maybe you meant to replace the 330 with a 1.2K to get it to bias right, in that case you just need to swap that one and the 33K.

*I'm really not certain, there are so many red wires.  But anyway, for NPN and negative ground, you want the black wire from the battery snap to go to the input jack ring connection.

[typo]

[Psychophonic]

Another noob here. Not wanting to hijack this thread, and my troubleshooting needs are similar. So I'd rather post here since I'm learning from this thread.

FF pcb with silicon NPN transistors, powered with a 9v battery.
I have it working but am getting a bit too much unwanted noise. Sounds as if there is a neon sign plugged into the same outlet, as best as I can describe. I have a similar diy germanium FF, also battery powered, that is as quiet as can be with the knobs dimed. Would like this Si FF equally as quiet (as possible at least).

Is this a common symptom? Here is the pcb I am using.

[Psychophonic]

Double post.

[Bandwagonesque]

hope this helps as I cant offer enough assistance in scoping what may be wrong just from your photos but after a recent fuzz face vero build, i was running into alot of noise issues after biasing things and being assured i had my wiring and all on point. I first added shielded wire to the input and output leads coming from jacks to the switch (cut and insulate the shield on one end and just wire up the internal bit, then wire the shielded to ground and the internal bit to tip). but that didn't help as much as hoped.

if im getting this wrong im sure somebody with more knowledge will correct me but look up 'miller caps and fuzz faces'. i ended up sticking a pair of 150pf caps across the base and collector of each cap and this is what helped and cleared everything up. I now tend to do this on all my fuzz faces because I keep running into this weird issue, but it works and doesnt take anything away from anything good. but I hope the cap fix may help.

[Psychophonic]

Cool, I will look into the Miller caps. I have my transistors socketed and am wondering if that's part of the noise issue. I just didn't want to risk damaging them by soldering them directly to the pcb. The sockets don't seem to hold all 3 legs firmly, so they wiggle around a bit. Not crazy about that.