Help with Polarised Cap Orientation

[emilyandmiles]

Hello all,

I've had this half finished for far to long now.

I've loads of 1uf Electro's lying about and was hoping to use those in place of C5 and C8.

Could anyone help me with cap orientation?

Many thanks,

[PRR]

In General:

Build it with pots and batteries but without those caps. Mark the cap locations for easy/safe probing. Power up. Put voltmeter where the cap will go. Note which side is "+". Now install the cap that way.

[Jdansti]

PRR's advice sounds good.  I recently built this but I had nonpolar caps for C5 and C8.

Off topic:  My understanding is that the SPDT switch on the commercial pedal has a center off position so that neither set of clipping diodes are in the circuit when the switch is in the center position. I substituted a rotary switch for the LED clipping diodes.  This gave me 6 additional sets of diodes to select from when the SPDT switch would have normally connected the LEDs.

I like the overall sound. Please post a note here when you've got it working to let us know how you like it. Have fun!

[digi2t]

In General:

Build it with pots and batteries but without those caps. Mark the cap locations for easy/safe probing. Power up. Put voltmeter where the cap will go. Note which side is "+". Now install the cap that way.

Thanks for that Paul! The same question crossed my mind a couple of times during builds, but never having to actually follow through, I never followed-up on it. Nice method, just burned it onto my mental hard-drive.

Going to bed less stoopid tonight... again  .

[emilyandmiles]

Some great tips as always. Thanks guys.

Still without a multimeter at the moment. Definitely something that needs rectifying soon.

Probably not the best method, but I ended up adding them on the back of the board for easy removal and just tried them different ways.

Tried various tapers but tone control dropped the signal at one end, looking into it I found some had similar problems : (

Ended up in my scrap parts box and instead knocked up the SRV Special TS found in gallery. Very happy with this one.