Wiring a 3pdt footswitch; having issues...

[dougman0988]

Hello there all,

I'm building a distortion pedal of my own design, and I'm having trouble getting the footswitch to work correctly.  The funny thing is that the first night I put this thing together it worked fine, but not anymore.  That's just how electronics is sometimes unfortunately.  Anyway, here's a description of my issue:

The pedal acts as though its in bypass when the LED is ON; that is, the normal guitar signal comes out of my amp.
When I hit the switch, the LED goes off, but then nothing at all comes through the amp.
A big surprise to me is that the LED turns ON even when the circuit is disconnected from my chassis ground.  How can current be drawn and light the LED if there's no return path!?

I've tried a few different wirings for the footswitch but I get the same result.  I went back to the PCB and turns out a wire had popped lose, but upon re-soldering it, the problem still persisted.  I can definitely still experiment and probably eventually find the issue, but I wanted to see if anyone could spot the issue right away?  I'm sure I've just done something dumb and don't realize it.

Thanks,

Doug

P.S.  I can draw up a schematic of my wiring later if necessary.  I don't have it on my work computer.

[compuwade]

It's hard to tell what the exact problem is, but I would eliminate the switch completly and see if your effect works. If it does (but I don't think it will) i would replace the switch and see if that works. If it doesn't then you probably have a short somewhere to ground.

[dougman0988]

Yeah I'm just gonna have to keep narrowing down the possibilities.  The effect worked great before I wired up the footswitch, DC power jack, etc and put everything together in the enclosure.  I'll try disconnecting everything and test the effect by itself and go from there.  Thanks for the response.

[MikeH]

Could you post a wiring diagram of how you wired your switch?  Also a pic of the switch would help too.

And welcome to the forum!

[compuwade]

Another thing, if your power jack is metal, it could be shorting to ground on your enclosure. If it's plastic then.......

[dougman0988]

After doing more troubleshooting I've determined it's a grounding problem.  Apparently my chassis ground wasn't a good enough connection to make things work right.  Do you guys have any tips for creating solid chassis grounds?  I tried soldering right to the chassis, but the solder won't stick...then I tried using electrical tape to hold the hardened solder to the chassis, and that isn't working either.  The enclosure I have was pre-drilled and the slots for the screws are too small for me to fit a bit of wire in there to make the screw hold the chassis ground together.

[pravudh]

I alway do chassis ground by solder volume lug (ground lug) to volume jacket.
this is good idea when you tight volume nut on the enclosure you get good chassis ground.

[dougman0988]

I'm pretty sure I've damaged my volume pot throughout my experimenting.  So now I have a fixed resistor in place of it.  Can you achieve the same ground by tying that resistor to the jacket of one of my other pots?

EDIT: Nvm, I found a way to make it work.  Thanks for the help everyone.